


Man-eaters of Kumaon

by ignipes



Series: The Lost Years (Harry Potter) [1]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-22
Updated: 2009-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:01:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>April, 1982. Remus Lupin travels to India to track a creature that has been devouring villagers in the Himalayan foothills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He dreams, as always, about hands. Pale, elegant, spidery hands, fluttering through an indistinct darkness. He watches the hands dance across his skin, their swift motions somehow detached from the gentle pressure on his thighs, stomach and chest. Long fingers play across his abdomen, fading to a soft scratching whisper of a touch--

Remus opens his eyes.

The darkness is absolute. He blinks rapidly, several times. The dream whispers are replaced, all at once, by the alien din of the jungle. A tickle of motion lingers on his bare chest, a half-sensation, barely a touch.

He blinks again and gradually the room sharpens; he can see the outline of the doorway, the patterned curtain moving gently, the whitewashed ceiling and the silhouettes of two geckos, just above him, curved in an uncanny yin and yang symmetry.

Still, there is the tickle on his chest. He reaches up to scratch idly, and his fingers encounter something both foreign and familiar.

"Oh, _fuck_."

Remus bolts upright and swipes at his chest frantically. He hears the cockroach hit the floor, somewhere to his left. Squirming like a madman, he shakes the threadbare sheet off of his body and brushes at the rest of the narrow cot, running his hands over his chest and arms, neck and hair. Just as quickly as he woke, he calms down, but the sudden frenetic activity has his blood racing and every inch of his skin crawling. He swings his legs off the cot; the dirt is cool and solid. Then he pulls his feet up, remembering the cockroach--now an angry cockroach--and peers carefully at the floor before setting his feet down again.

After a moment, he stands up and steps over to the doorway, gingerly making the two metre journey with no close encounters of the entomological kind. He pushes the curtain aside and leans against the rough wooden frame.

The night is surprisingly pleasant. Still hot by English standards--by any standards, really, especially for April--but nowhere near as stifling as the day had been. After seven hours in New Delhi, another ten on that infernal Muggle train and the dirty, manic, heart-stopping drive from Kathgodam into the jungle, Remus was certain his lungs would never again know fresh, clean air. The night here is heavy with the odour of livestock and some distant field fire, but it is still infinitely better than the black exhaust and choking press of bodies in the city.

They've set him up in a little bungalow near the edge of the village, facing the jungle. It's barely a room, three walls haphazardly built off of the back of one of the larger houses. Remus looks about from his position in the doorway, fascinated by the complete lack of artificial light. It seems candles and lamps are dear, and the Muggle electricity is only on for a few hours in the evening. The moon, a thin waning crescent, has already set, and there's a thick haze--smoke from that fire, most likely--cloaking the stars.

Remus listens carefully to the jungle, trying to hear something beyond the persistent, raucous clatter of insects.

_It sounds like a woman screaming_, one of the villagers said. _A demon_, others protested. _No, a sick monkey_, yet another asserted, _that is the sound_. Remus had frowned and struggled not to laugh. Half-delirious with exhaustion, he'd forced his face into a mask of serious contemplation when Rakesh repeated the description, and decided to worry about what a sick monkey sounds like after a few hours of sleep.

They call it _kali vastu_, the black thing. They will not give it another name.

It took three buffalo, they said. Four dogs. Eleven chickens. Two children and one sick old man. But no goats; the creature in the jungle has no taste for goats. The children were from another village, five miles from Pakhari, young lads pushing the family bicycle along the muddy track because they'd come to retrieve a broken wireless from their uncle, who was good at fixing that sort of thing. The wireless had been smashed, the boys dragged into the jungle, the bicycle left in a twisted heap beside the road. No, they heard nothing that night. Sometimes the creature screams, sometimes it doesn't.

Somewhere, to his left, there is a heavy thud. His pulse quickens. Slowly, Remus turns his head.

A huge, lumbering, dark shape stands beside hut. It takes another step, and Remus jerks backward, knocking his elbow into the other side of the doorframe.

Then his mind clicks in recognition. _Water buffalo_. He can hear it chewing, barely ten feet away, and he can smell it, hot, pungent and dung-rich, stronger than all the other night scents.

"Stupid," he says quietly, not sure if he's addressing himself or the sad, angular jumble of skin and bones munching in the shadows.

Feeling remarkably calm for one who has braved the nocturnal challenges of assertive arthropods and insomniac ungulates, Remus rolls his head to release the tension in his neck.

It's the travelling, he tells himself, that is keeping him awake despite his exhaustion, the travelling and the sun setting five and a half hours earlier than his body expects, the violent assault on his senses, the sagging unfamiliar bed. It's the bloody impertinent cockroach in the dirty, stained, drooping, unfamiliar bed. And, he reminds himself, lest he forget, the bloody cockroach's mates, an assortment of scurrying beetles in various shapes and sizes, ranging from rather large to just plain absurd, whose decorative exoskeletons he noted with some alarm before passing out hours ago.

Nobody can be expected to sleep well his first night in a hut that would make a decent exhibit in a living history museum of exotic entomology.

It's not the dream. Not the hands, the long, lovely, bodiless hands, moving over his skin with confidence and skill, reaching detached from the murky dream-dark. They are hands that don't require arms, not that he ever looks, his dream mind knowing better than to follow the pale line of wrist and forearm, knowing better than to let his dream hands reach and trace the muscled arms and broad shoulders.

Remus rolls his head again. There must be some way to tighten the cot so it doesn't sag so much.

His dream mind knows to turn away from the pulse of the neck, to ease back from the line of the jaw, even when his dream lips and dream tongue ache with the tastes denied.

The water buffalo decides to seek its midnight meal in another patch of mud, and it lumbers away. Its scent lingers.

_Isn't it odd_, Remus thinks, rubbing his forearms slowly. He lifts one bare foot to scratch the other ankle, concentrating on the soft brush of trousers against skin. _Isn't it odd that in six months of dreams, six months of disembodied hands, six months of quick, confused awakenings, isn't it odd that I've never once seen his face._

He had expected to be plagued by nightmares. He'd expected screams and sobs and night-sweats and tremors and soul-gripping terror.

During the chaotic aftermath--long hours at the Ministry that stretched into days, a haze of questions, headaches and a thousand different stories from a thousand different faces--he never once thought, _This can't be happening, this can't be real, this must be a dream._

Somebody--who was it? He can't remember--gently took his hand and said, _I know it doesn't seem real, Remus, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry._

And all he could reply was, _What a peculiar thing to say._

He yawns and rubs his hand over his face. _What a bloody stupid thing to say._ Nothing has ever been more real, that he knows. He knows it so deeply that he doesn't even bother to dream about it. There is no need for dreams when every waking thought is focused on the same nightmare.

He doesn't need to see a face in his dreams, because that face spent weeks laughing maniacally on the front page of every newspaper in the wizarding world.

Remus yawns again. Tonight, the jungle is patently devoid of screaming women and sick monkeys. He guesses that sunrise is hours away, though his internal clock is still stuck somewhere over Persia. He pushes away from the doorframe and turns back to the claustrophobic little room. The geckos have rearranged themselves on the ceiling, their yin and yang disrupted. One of the beetles has joined them, lurking in the corner, probably a beetle sentinel, or maybe a lonely beetle outcast.

Remus whips the sheet up and shakes it, just in case, then runs his hand over the thin mattress. He lies face-up and pulls the sheet over his chest; it is too short and leaves his feet exposed, so he tugs it down. After a moment's contemplation he pulls it up again, reasoning that should the cockroach rejoin him--or one of its many friends, for surely none of them will suffer to be left out once the tale of the mad flailing Englishman spreads amongst the insect community--he would rather it creep across his bare feet or trouser-clad legs than across his arms or chest or face.

Closing his eyes, Remus wonders, _Why did I have to think about it crawling on my face?_

But he is soon asleep, despite the ghostly touches on his skin, and he does not dream.

* * *

Rakesh enters the bungalow with a quiet greeting and a saucer of tea. Remus wakes slowly, suffering several moments' confusion at the sight of the strange barren room and the young man talking over him. He sits up and lowers his feet to the floor, gratefully accepts the saucer and sips the sweet, spicy tea. By the brilliant sunshine in the doorway, Remus guesses that it is midmorning at best, perhaps closer to noon.

"The men are waiting to take you into the jungle," Rakesh says, when Remus shows no signs of putting on his shoes or standing up.

Remus nods and rubs his hand over his face, then sips the tea again.

"You want food?" Rakesh asks.

Remus nods again and manages a rough, "Yes, thank you." Then, as Rakesh is leaving, he says, more clearly, "Just a few minutes."

He pulls his travelling case onto the bed and thanks whatever prudent instinct led him to fasten it the night before. He rummages and finds socks and a light cotton shirt. While buttoning the shirt, he pauses for a moment to wonder where all the insects and geckos go during the day. Remus finds his shoes under the bed and shakes them out before putting them on. He slips his wand into his back pocket and leaves his shirt untucked to hide it from view. He feels shabby and rumpled, but he realises that even his worst clothes are still better than the very best of the villagers'.

He meets Rakesh walking around the side of the bungalow. Rakesh is carrying a rusty metal tray with some food on it and another saucer of tea, and he seems surprised that Remus is outside. Nonetheless he takes Remus back to his own house, and while Remus eats, the men of Pakhari gather around talking. Every few minutes Rakesh translates something for Remus, but none of it is terribly helpful; their ideas about the creature's habits are difficult to follow without any understanding of the local geography. All the same, Remus listens politely, quietly sipping his tea. He is relieved when Rakesh notices that he is finished and announces that it is time to go into the jungle.

Remus carries only his wand, a bottle of water on a cord slung over his shoulder and a handkerchief in his pocket. Professor Kettleburn's contact in Nainital, Mr. Chandrasekhar, claims with absolute certainty that it was no ordinary jungle carnivore, no tiger or leopard, nothing that could be felled by Muggle methods. Kettleburn suspects it is an occamy, a distant relative of the animal that had brought him to these same Himalayan foothills forty-odd years ago, but after hearing the villagers' descriptions Remus is unconvinced. He has never heard of an occamy that claims prey as large as buffalo. Whatever the creature, magic is the only weapon he knows how to use, yet Remus feels naked as the only man on their foray through the jungle without a machete, and he is careful to keep pace with Rakesh's long strides.

Three men from the village are walking with them, ahead of Rakesh in a tight, muttering group. Two of them, like Rakesh, are wearing long trousers, dirty faded t-shirts and smooth-soled leather shoes; the third man, the eldest, is wearing only a ragged length of cotton about his waist as a loincloth and _chappal_ sandals on his feet. Some of the young boys from the village are trailing behind. Remus can feel their eyes on his back; he hears them chatting playfully and suspects that they are talking about him.

After ten minutes, Remus acknowledges that the jungle is seething with living things, most of whom are currently trying to bite their way through his skin. He swats ineffectually at the mosquitoes on his neck. Marvelling at Rakesh's apparent insensitivity to their constant swarming, Remus endeavours for a few moments to achieve the same Zen-like immunity, but he gives up almost immediately and resumes swatting.

He wonders if there is an anti-mosquito spell in his _Fangworthy's Guide to Wizarding India_, which he has not yet read, despite promising Professor Kettleburn before leaving England.

After twenty minutes, Remus believes he will never stop sweating. The men of the village are unaffected by the heat, and Remus is painfully self-conscious of the way his cotton shirt sticks to his back and beads of sweat trail down his face. They are climbing into the steep hills north of the village, and the air is rich with the smell of organic matter. The foliage is thick, though they appear to be following some sort of trail. Unfortunately, the shade provides little relief from the heat.

After one hour, the young boys have lost interest in the trek and return to Pakhari for more enjoyable pursuits. About the same time, it occurs to Remus for the very first time in his life--though he feels no particular joy or import at the occasion--that he has reason to be glad he is a werewolf. Werewolves do not get malaria. Werewolves do not get encephalitis. Werewolves do not get cholera, _Giardia_ or any other waterborne disease that is the cause of much intestinal distress in travellers, wizard and Muggle alike. So when the men stop to drink from a spring that is bubbling from the hillside, Remus does not hesitate to do the same. He listens half-heartedly to Rakesh arguing with the other men, pointing in various directions, obviously trying to decide where to go next. Remus feels a moment of panic when he realises that he doesn't quite know where they are in relation to the village. He vows to pay better attention for the rest of the day.

He splashes some of the cool water over his head, running his fingers through his hair and enjoying the feel of the droplets falling down his back.

"The men disagree about which way to go," Rakesh tells him unnecessarily.

Remus nods politely and wipes his face with his handkerchief.

"They are worried that you are not asking questions."

This surprises Remus, as the village men, with the exception of Rakesh, seemed to have lost interest in his pale English reticence only minutes after meeting him the night before. Remus explains, "I'm trying to learn the lay of the land. I can't find the creature if I don't know its territory."

He does not say,_ If it's a magical creature we're looking for, wandering blindly about the jungle is unlikely to do any good_. In truth, Remus has no plan for finding the _kali vastu_, and he thinks--for about the fiftieth time since leaving England--that he ought to have said, "No, thank you," to Professor Kettleburn, even if the reward offered by Mr. Chandrasekhar is appealing.

"The men have never met a hunter who does not carry weapons," Rakesh says, sounding both sheepish and desperate. It is obviously a concern he shares.

Remus curses inwardly. He wonders what weapons Kettleburn carried in the days when he still had two arms and a liking for chasing dangerous creatures around the globe. His mind forms a picture of Kettleburn outfitted in true Hemingway style, long rifle in hand, hat brim shading his face, boot resting imperiously a dead nundu.

Remus decides to carry a machete tomorrow. It seems to be the tool of choice for men in the jungle, and it does have a certain satisfying style. He says to Rakesh, "It has never attacked during the daylight."

"Darkness may come unexpected," is all Rakesh replies.

Two hours later, Remus begins to suspect that Rakesh is right. There is something very odd about this jungle.

The men don't feel it, of course; they have lived in Pakhari their entire lives, and they are Muggles. They find nothing peculiar in the fact that they stop every ten minutes to argue about which direction to turn, speak in loud raucous voices, flail their arms about and stand very close to one another.

_Well_, Remus admits to himself, _the shouting and flailing and standing too close is probably cultural, and nothing to do with the fact that they're attempting to penetrate the borders of a heartwood._

As another dispute is settled and the men start walking again, Remus follows with a bit more energy in his step. They turn to travel along the hillside, rather than climbing further, following a faint trace of a path.

"Soon," Rakesh says, after a few moments, "you will see where the _kali vastu_ first killed." Remus is slightly surprised by that pronouncement; he had understood, from Rakesh's spotty translations the night before, that the creature only killed near the village and road.

He says nothing, content to follow for now, peering into the jungle on either side with renewed interest.

Mr. Chandrasekhar in Nainital did not mention a heartwood; Remus wonders if he is even aware of it. There are few enough magical lands left in the world, and most of them are deteriorating, like the Forbidden Forest near Hogwarts. Enough magic remains to keep Muggles out, but wizards can wander in with little trouble. _Little trouble attributable to the Forest itself_, Remus amends. The Forest's inhabitants are another matter entirely. Yet there remains, deep in the Forbidden Forest, a region that even wizards cannot breach.

Half an hour later, the men enter a small clearing on the hillside. A tiny wooden hut is set against the trees, empty and crumbling.

"This is where a man lived. He was _korhi_," Rakesh says, wrinkling his brow in concentration. Remus shakes his head, not understanding. Rakesh tries again, "A sick man. A disease. He lived apart, not in the village."

"A leper?" Remus guesses.

Rakesh nods. "Yes, yes. Leper. _Korhi_. He was a sick old man, his daughter lives in Almora. He was the first. The women were collecting wood, down the hill," he points vaguely, "and they found his leg."

Remus doesn't reply; the men are looking at him expectantly. "Only his leg?" he asks after a moment, keeping his voice calm and emotionless.

"Torn off below the knee, with tooth marks," Rakesh adds. Then he speaks rapidly to the other men, and they launch into conversation, probably a vivid discussion of body parts discarded by the _kali vastu_.

Remus wanders over to the hut and peers inside; it is empty except for a clay bowl and straw mat on the floor. The tiny space is filled with the stench of decay and illness, and he holds his breath while examining the flimsy wooden walls and crooked doorway. He is now almost certain the creature is not an occamy, for those predators, even when old, injured, or desperate, are notoriously finicky about the health of their prey. There are no scratch marks or shattered boards in the hut, nothing to indicate the creature took the man from his miserable home. Remus imagines an old man, restless and unable to sleep, struggling up from his straw mat and hobbling into the moonlit clearing, wanting only a breath of fresh air and facing instead a sudden, terrifying crash in the bushes, a hot gasp on his neck--

_Or perhaps not_, Remus thinks. Perhaps the creature moves silently, its advantage in stealth rather than strength. No one alive knows its methods. All that remains of those who see it are stray parts.

There is nothing to see in the clearing, nothing to be found in the pitiful hut. The men are disappointed that Remus shares no grand insights, but he remains silent and they reluctantly start down the mountain, toward the village. Remus follows automatically, his mind only half-attentive to the route. The gentle magical pull of the heartwood does not lessen as they descend, and though they seem to be travelling in a straight line, it takes more than three hours for them to reach the valley floor. Remus turns and looks up at the hill; as he expected, it is in no way high enough or steep enough to account for the miles and hours they walked that day. Rakesh sees his frown and gives him a silent, solemn stare. Remus wonders if the villagers are not quite as oblivious to the heartwood as he suspected.

The main road to the village winds through intermittent fields and untouched stands of thick, shadowy jungle. As they pass, people come from the fields to ask about their day. By the time they reach the spot where the two boys were taken from the road, the number of men in the group has grown to ten, and each one of them is trying to force his own version of the story on Remus. Rakesh tells Remus that the boys' father found the bicycle at the edge of this deeply shaded grove and went into the forest to find his sons.

"But he did not find them that night, so in the morning the men of the village searched," Rakesh explains. "Much later in the day, one of the men found one boy's foot, and the other's head, not far from here."

The foot and head were cremated, just as the old leper's leg had been. Remus is vaguely relieved; he had been worried that the villages might insist he look at the remains. It's thoughtful of the _kali vastu_, Remus decides, to leave a bit of its victims behind.

The crowd of men disperses when they reach the village, and Rakesh takes Remus through the nearby farms and fields to show him where the livestock was taken.

"And you found only pieces," Remus guesses.

Rakesh nods. "Feet."

* * *

Remus discovers that it is harder than it looks to eat _dal_ and _roti_ without flatware, but he is careful to use only his right hand and finds the meal quite satisfying. After thanking Rakesh's mother, a pleasant, smiling woman with a yellow shawl that covers her hair but not her face, he returns to his bungalow in anticipation of a good night's sleep. He has taken a candle from Rakesh, though he has no intention of using it. He simply needs some way to explain the wandlight should anyone see it coming from his room.

He removes _Fangworthy's Guide to Wizarding India_ from his case and settles onto the bed with the goal of learning a few rudimentary Hindi phrases. In typical British imperial style, Fergus Fangworthy assumes that everyone an intrepid wizard will encounter on the subcontinent speaks either English or Hindi; he affords no more than a single sentence to the nation's seventeen other official languages. Remus is seized by a momentary panic, worried that the conversation that has surrounded him for two days isn't actually Hindi, that he has no book to consult, no way to learn how to say "thank you" in--he scans Fangworthy's dismissive list--Punjabi or Urdu or Marathi. Flipping through the index he finds Nainital, the nearest town, and turns to page 139. _Nainital is the lakeside jewel of the Kumaon region, in the Hindi-speaking territory of Uttar Pradesh._

"Well," Remus says, relieved. "That's good."

He returns to the back of the book, and carefully pronounces, "_Namaste._"

There is a flicker of moment at the edge of his vision. Remus looks quickly to the left, his shadow jumping wildly in the blue-white light. On the whitewashed wall near the floor a cockroach is edging its way toward the bed. Remus frowns at it. He glances at the curtain billowing gently in the doorway, glares at the cockroach, then looks at the book in his hands. He turns to Fangworthy's table of contents and scans the chapter titles.

"'Magical Aids for the Healthful, Comfortable Traveller,'" he reads. "Page 12." Beginning on page 12, Remus finds an extensive list of charms, potions and magical items with which a well-prepared traveller ought to familiarise himself before embarking on a journey to India. He reads a likely-looking section entitled "Cleanliness and Safety", and discovers _Linumpurgaritus_ for questionable bedding, _Cibus rancidus_ for suspicious food, and _Mendicus repellere_, which Remus thinks would have made his brief minutes in the New Delhi train station far less trying. He recalls the mob of children crowding around him, hands grasping at his pockets and voices pleading for change with a few precious English words: _mister, please, thank you, mister_; silent dull-eyed families living on filthy blankets between the tracks; women in vibrant _saris_\--unnerving flashes of red, orange and blue--poised, elegant, exquisitely beautiful despite the gritty surroundings; businessmen in polyester and tweed, hurrying through the choking heat, cheap taped and tied-up cases held close to their sides; porters with orange sashes draped over their greasy hair, shouting belligerently and trying to wrench his own tattered travelling case from his hands.

Suppressing an indistinct feeling of guilt, Remus reads the description.

_Mendicus repellere_. _Many English wizards have understandably found this charm indispensable when travelling in regions of extreme poverty, overpopulation or inefficient local law enforcement. It allows the traveller to move about the scenery and enjoy the sights without the danger and distractions brought on by unwanted interaction with unfortunate Muggles who can occasionally behave with exceptional impoliteness, disrespect and persistence toward foreigners._

Remus entertains a brief feeling of exceptional disrespect toward Fergus Fangworthy and flips a few pages further, reading only the section headings. His amused enthusiasm is gone. Now he is merely tired and wants the damn cockroaches to be gone so he can get some sleep.

Then, near the end of the chapter, he finds "Insects and Pests".

_Plagatis_. _This simple charm is especially useful for wizards travelling in regions where quality accommodation may be difficult to obtain. It is also favoured by sensitive or squeamish witches who wish travel without continual encroachment on their person by the lesser native species._ _The charm will expel any pests, magical or otherwise, currently in the accommodation and prevent others from entering until the spell is ended by _Finite Incantatem.

Remus pauses, not wishing to lump himself in with the lot of sensitive and squeamish witches. But he decides that it won't hurt to at least try, so he reads the casting instructions, mutters the incantation a few times under his breath, then stands up and points to one of the corners of the room. "_Plagatis cubiculum!_" There is a momentary shiver of air, but no other sign that the charm has begun to work. Remus turns to the next corner and repeats, "_Plagatis cubiculum!"_ Again, the same whisper of motion, like a light breeze, but nothing more. He casts the charm in the other two corners, waits for the magical breeze to settle, then peers cautiously at the floor near the bed.

The cockroach is still there. It has been joined by a cricket.

Remus tries again, speaking the incantation clearly and firmly, hoping no curious villager is listening and wondering why the Englishman in the bungalow is talking to himself.

The cockroach remains unaffected. It crawls a bit across the floor, then stops.

Remus thinks, _It really is a very large cockroach_. He sits down on the bed to reread the description and notices that two dusty green lizards have scurried up the opposite wall.

A third attempt with the charm yields no better result, and Remus tosses Fangworthy at the floor near the cockroach, sending the insect scuttling under the bed. It's been years since he was unable to perform a simple charm on the second or third try. Remus scowls at the book, then turns to the lizards and says, "Fangworthy probably just invented that incantation, to reassure the squeamish squealing witches. If Lily were here--"

But she isn't.

One of the geckos darts up the wall and onto the ceiling.

Remus reaches down and retrieves the book from the floor. His tired muscles protest, and suddenly his skin is hot and uncomfortable, coated with the day's sweat and dust. His shirt is beige with dirt, and salty stains mark the collar and underarms. He stands up quickly and strips it off, then searches through his case for the towel he remembered to pack at the last minute. Grabbing his wand from where he's lodged it between the bed and wall, he mutters, "_Nox," _and hurries out of the bungalow.

There is a pump at one edge of the village, surrounded by a platform of stones. Remus walks toward it purposefully. Several villagers are still awake, leaning in doorways and crouched in groups of three or four, falling silent as he strides past. He can barely see them in the dark, but he feels their eyes follow him to the open area just beyond the houses, near the road. Remus seizes the rusty pump handle and wrenches it up and down, listening for the quiet _glurg_ in the pipe as the water rises. As the water spouts out, Remus curses himself for not bringing soap but scrubs his shirt beneath the flow anyway. When the shirt is thoroughly drenched and wrung, he dampens one end of the towel and washes his hair and face, chest and arms, then, thanking the obscuring darkness, removes his shoes and trousers and washes the rest of himself, relishing the chill of the water.

He pats his skin with the dry end of the towel and pulls his trousers on, slips into his shoes, picks up the wet lump that is his shirt. He wrings it out again and walks back to the bungalow. Examining the barren room, he takes his wand from his pocket and says, "_Lineo._" A long strand of twine shoots out the end of his wand and fastens itself to the walls. He hangs the towel and shirt over the line, removes his shoes, shakes out the sheet and lays down.

In the dark, in the quiet, his breathing slows. The bedclothes are rough under his freshly-scrubbed skin.

_There is a time and there is a place_, Remus tells himself, _for these thoughts_. He moves his lips but makes no sound.

He spent weeks--months, even--at the mercy of his own mind. Tossing Floo powder into the fireplace and half-speaking, "Pet--" before choking on the word. Walking by the park and watching for a crimson stroller and a flash of long red hair. Stopping to look in toy shop windows and noting the cost of the charmed wooden blocks, imagining them clasped in little hands. Opening the door of the flat and reflexively looking for the black leather jacket on the hook. Reaching across the bed and waking with a start when his hand encountered cold linen rather than a warm sleeping body. Looking up from his reading when he heard a motorbike roar down the street. Leaving the _Prophet_ on the kitchen table, open to the half-finished crossword.

He even Apparated to the edge of Hogsmeade once, on a Thursday night in January. He walked as far as the shop across from the Three Broomsticks and stood there, hands in his pockets, for a long time. Inside a man was celebrating his birthday; the warmth and sound spilled out of the pub and across the frozen street. Rosemerta's hearty chortle, the teases and taunts of the man's friends, the breaking of glass followed by a roar of laughter. Through the front window Remus could see four men gathered around the little corner table. One of them was sitting on his chair turned around, his elbows resting on the back. They were not with the birthday party, but they were laughing, joking and drinking together on a Thursday night in January. Two months, and the world had gone back to celebrating birthdays and Thursdays.

Remus returned to the edge of town and Apparated to London. He stood in the centre of the cold, dark flat and listened for footsteps, listened for a voice, waited for arms to circle his waist and a chin to rest on his shoulder. He waited for a minute, maybe two, but no longer. Then he wiped a tear off his cheek, hung his coat on the hook, went into the bedroom and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, until the sun began to rise.

Remus closes his eyes. His shirt is dripping steadily--_drip, drip, drip_\--and he shivers slightly as a breeze stirs the curtain and caresses his skin.

_There is a time and a place_, Remus thinks, but tonight his muscles are tired, and in the morning there is a heartwood to search and a monster to find.


	2. Chapter 2

The mountainside spring splashes onto an uneven platform of mud-bricks before continuing its journey into the valley. Remus crouches on the platform and cups his hand beneath the trickle of cool water, drinking thirstily and wetting his face and neck. It is just after noon; the Indian sun is high and fierce, and the air quivers with inescapable heat. He takes a few steps away from the spring and sits on a fallen log, not bothering to wipe away the droplets that trickle down his face.

He has his wand in his pocket and a machete in his belt. Today he's left the men of Pakhari behind, assuring Rakesh that he will not get lost and he has no intention of being eaten. Rakesh was doubtful. Even if the _kali vastu_ attacks only at night, he protested, there are still tigers and leopards in the jungle. Remus doubts this; non-magical predators tend to avoid the territories of magical ones. Retracing their route from the day before, Remus has been thinking, and he has been planning. He knows that he is no Great White Hunter; he hasn't the skill or fortitude of Professor Kettleburn. He has very little idea how to go about finding the _kali vastu_, and as for what he will do when he does locate the creature, Remus has no plan at all.

But he is fairly certain that the _kali vastu_ lives in the heartwood. All of the attacks, even those on livestock, have occurred at the edge of the dense, wild patches of jungle that remain mysteriously untouched by the villagers. Remus is beginning to think that nothing more exotic that habitat loss may be responsible for the creature's recent appetite. The surrounding hills are carved up in terraces and fields, covered with crops and trampled by buffalo. Remus sees no rhyme or reason to the pattern of jungle patches left undisturbed, but he is not surprised. One cannot simply stand on a hillside and trace the edges of a heartwood.

Remus knows where his mind is leading him. When he tallies up his magical talents, tracking unidentified magical creatures through an alien landscape is nowhere on the list. It is, after all, a rather short list, with "healing charms" and "research of obscure historical topics" at the top.

Followed, very closely, by "mapmaking".

So Remus decides to map the heartwood.

He doesn't even know if it is possible. As far as he knows, nobody has ever successfully mapped a heartwood. His knowledge of magical lands is limited to a few esoteric comments found in various historical and cartographic texts, usually along the lines of: _The borders of the Gringleffingham Moor are unknown and continually shifting due to the influence of the powerful magical landscape theorised to exist in within its boundaries._ Several ambiguous paragraphs, no more. _And_, Remus adds, _one half-remembered conversation from a frosty morning in the Forbidden Forest_. But he doesn't want to structure his task around the misty musings of a centaur.

It can't be more difficult than mapping Hogwarts, he reasons. Even if he is alone now.

Remus sees only two options. One, he can wander about the jungle at night and hope he finds the creature before it finds him. Or two, he can learn its territory, perhaps find a pattern to its attacks, and go after it armed with a knowledgeable advantage.

Today he has brought with him a large length of parchment and an inconspicuous Muggle pen. Rather than following yesterday's route along the hillside north of the spring, he searches for a spot from which he can view the valley below. Such a vantage is difficult to find, as there are few breaks in the thick foliage, but he locates one that will do and settles down on the ground to sketch. He shifts uncomfortably for a few moments, aware of every sound and scratch that might be a six-legged jungle inhabitant welcoming him to its home, but he soon relaxes and begins to draw. He denotes the tiny village of Pakhari as a cluster of little boxes, the road as a line extending from it at either end. The patches of jungle he outlines with primitive trees, and for the fields and terraces he manages a reasonable approximation of furrows. When he has drawn everything he can see, Remus frowns at the childish sketch. He hasn't Peter's skill for drafting, that much is certain, but it will have to do.

In tiny lettering, in each corner of the parchment, he writes a single word: _Capere._ Then, along the edges, he writes, _Terrum._ Between the words, on each edge, he carefully traces the Ogham runes _nion_ and _ailm_\--ash and silver fir--then turns the parchment over. He pauses, repeating the words in his mind, remembering the pale slant of autumn sun in the library, two black heads bent over a massive tome across the table, dust, leather and wood illuminated with a soft golden glow.

In the centre of the parchment, Remus writes four lines:

_Uncouth and savage was the fir,_

_Cruel the ash tree--_

_Turns not aside a foot-breadth,_

_Straight at the heart runs he._

It was James' idea to use _Cad Goddeu_ to tie the edges of the map together, when they first realised that the spell had a tendency to escape the parchment and apply itself to any available surface. Remus doesn't remember his justification, but, like most of James' wilder ideas, it worked, and it prevented a recurrence of the unfortunate experiment that left Peter with a map of the Gryffindor boys' toilets on his forearm for three days.

Remus shoves the pen into his pocket and takes his wand in hand. He turns the parchment again so he is looking at his crude map and touches the wand to the centre.

"_Designa tabulam_," he says.

A shimmer of soft golden light passes over the parchment. The lines and shapes wriggle in its wake, stretching and bending, then snapping back into place with a barely audible _twang_, shivering for a few seconds before falling still. The light fades and the parchment looks as it did before, a childish scrawl of a map.

It is late afternoon, now, and diabolically hot, but Remus wants to test just one landmark before stopping for the day. He climbs back along the hill to the spring and is not surprised when the distance seems much further than it had before. He sits again on the fallen log and sketches a makeshift spring symbol on the map. He touches the tip of his wand to the symbol and says, "_Designa primolocum_." Light washes the map again, pale blue now, and the lines shiver into place. The spring symbol seems to fade and settle, becoming something old and dignified, grandfather to the other markings on the parchment.

Remus rolls the map carefully, puts his wand in his pocket and starts down the hill.

* * *

Slowly, the map takes shape. It is much harder with one person than it had been with four, but Remus does not dwell on that. Working alone simply requires that he retrace his steps often to tie one point to another, rather than being able to cast the location charm simultaneously in more than one place. The villagers ask him what he is doing, and he explains that he is tracking the creature's movements, which is only a partial lie. Sometimes young boys from the village will join him, and he is forced to spend the day peering at broken twigs and trampled ground, pretending to know the first thing about tracking a magical predator through an Indian jungle. He quickly learns, however, that if he promises to play cricket with the boys in the evening they will not bother him during the day, and he soon finds himself looking forward to their scrabbling twilight games. All of the schoolchildren know some English, and Remus enjoys answering their questions and teaching them harmless insults like _berk,_ _fool_ and _brother of a monkey_. He is growing used to the adults in the village, too, greeting them by name when he passes through their fields. Many of the men invite him to eat at their homes, and he happily accepts, although he privately prefers the smiling silence of Rakesh's mother.

Rakesh knows he is a making a map of some sort, and Remus suspects that Rakesh knows he is mapping the heartwood. But the young man does not ask him about it. Remus does tell him to make it very clear to the villagers that they must stay away from the dense stands of jungle after dark, and Rakesh nods in that peculiar Indian way, a rolling motion of the head that looks more like a negative shake than a positive nod.

It takes only a few days for Remus to identify the challenges the heartwood presents for an amateur cartographer. At Hogwarts, they mapped only the edges of the Forbidden Forest, their primary purpose being to avoid detention and Slytherin tell-tales. Even then they noticed how the map seemed to shy away from the Forest, refusing to settle as a location, until they decided to simply freeze the Forest boundaries and not worry about it. Remus doesn't have that option now, but he believes he can devise a method for working around it. He spends his days wandering the hills, locating and charting the jungle and fields with increasing accuracy, and he watches in fascination as the map morphs and grows. There are no people on it--he hasn't bothered with the complex tracking charms--but the blank regions of the heartwood are becoming ominously clear.

Each night he bathes at the village pump; the villagers have grown used to his eccentric habits. By wandlight he teaches himself to say _shurkriya_ and _koi bat nahi_ to the cockroaches, politely imploring, "_Kya ap ko angrezi ati kai?_" To which the cockroaches respond by scurrying under the bed. He reads through _Fangworthy's Guide_ with amusement and dismay, pitying the unsuspecting traveller who arrives in India expecting to find the bejewelled and storied land Fangworthy describes.

Remus has only one other book, purchased in Delhi on his first miserable, bewildering and terrifying day in India. He arrived by Portkey at four in the morning and spent the next five hours sitting in uncomfortable chairs in shabby offices, meeting with men who held titles like "Administrator of Magical Compliance, Northern Tourism Division" and "Undersecretary of Travel Restrictions, Subcontinental Enforcement Squad".

Remus doesn't know what exactly the Brits left behind when they vacated India some thirty years before, but Indian Ministry of Magic makes its blundering, bumbling British counterpart seems almost efficient by comparison. The Indian Ministry has done everything in its power, and few things Remus wouldn't have thought possible, to make travel difficult for magical visitors to India. Apparition is forbidden, as are Portkeys; broomsticks and carpets are controlled by usurious deposits and licensing fees. There are a dozen pamphlets explaining all of this in all eighteen official Indian languages, including Sanskrit--Remus wonders if there are wizards in the world who actually use Sanskrit in everyday life--but Remus simply admits defeat and agrees to travel by Muggle transportation only.

"The trains are very slow, however," says the Undersecretary of Travel Restrictions, a Sikh with a black turban and the unlikely name of Patrick O'Malley Singh. "And the drivers are not trustworthy. They will take you to some place and demand your money."

Undersecretary Singh has just spent forty minutes explaining to Remus the impossibility of travelling by magic. Remus inhales very, very slowly, and repeats, "I think the train will be just fine." It is what Kettleburn's friend in Nainital suggested, anyway, and Remus has the name of a man who can drive him to Pakhari from the train station in Kathgodam.

The one thing that has kept Remus from shouting during the last four hours is the Galleon-rupee exchange rate, which has him feeling a great deal richer than he was when he when he left England, and well able to afford train tickets.

He asks, "There are a few things I would like to buy before I leave the city. Can you point me to some shops?"

This is something Undersecretary Singh is prepared to do. He shows Remus an incomprehensible map and points quickly, "You are here, on Janpath. There are shops here, at Connaught Place." He advises Remus to take a taxi, and before he can launch into a lengthy discourse on the dangers of travelling by rickshaw in Delhi, Remus thanks him and bids him farewell.

Remus leaves the Indian Ministry of Magic, sheaf of official documents in hand, and steps into the sweltering heat. It is barely nine in the morning, and he begins to sweat immediately. The exterior of the Ministry is no more attractive than the interior: a low, unremarkable concrete building, surrounded by uniformed guards and palm trees, with a high iron fence protecting it from the road. Janpath is surprisingly wide and very nearly pleasant, lined with trees and fences, official-looking embassies and residences. He walks for a bit in the direction of Connaught Place before deciding to brave a lift in one of the three-wheeled diesel rickshaws belching black smoke into the shimmering, strangling air, which already smells strongly of petrol, rot and human waste. It takes a few tries before a rickshaw swerves to the curb at his raised hand, and before he climbs in, Remus asks, "Connaught Place?"

"Twenty rupees," the driver says.

Remus climbs in, hauling his case onto his lap, and the driver veers into traffic.

After two minutes, Remus surreptitiously reaches into his pocket and grasps his wand. Laws against Apparition be damned; if it becomes apparent that death-by-traffic-accident is imminent, he's Apparating out of this careering coffin as fast as he can think the spell. While Remus' knuckles become whiter, gripping his case and wand, the driver guns fearlessly up the Janpath, oblivious to the autos, buses, bicycles, rickshaws, motorbikes carrying entire families of five, buffalo-drawn carts and occasional stationary cow on the road. Some interminable time later, the traffic has clogged to a halt and the driver twists around to look at Remus. "Connaught Place. Fifty rupees."

Remus frowns, climbing out and noting that he is in the middle of a jammed road. "You said twenty rupees."

"Fifty rupees."

"We agreed twenty."

"Too long. Sixty."

Remus rattles through the coins and tattered paper notes in his pocket and comes up with thirty rupees. He gives it to the driver, who scowls and continues to argue as Remus hurries to the side of the road. There do appear to be shops everywhere, although he has no idea if this is his intended destination. He begins to wander, following the front of a massive, curving white building that, he supposes, was once quite spectacular, though now it is now merely large, worn with decay and grime. He pauses for a moment to mutter a binding spell on his case and a protection spell on his money pouch, and thanks Merlin he was born a wizard rather than a hapless, vulnerable Muggle.

It doesn't take long for Remus to find the things he wants to buy: a couple of shirts, because they're quite affordable and he knows the sweat and dirt is going to ruin the few he has, some Muggle pens and a notepad of plain paper. He has a few hours before his train leaves for Uttar Pradesh, and a faint anxiety is growing in his gut. When he spots the bookstore, his face breaks into a relieved grin. The shop is small, but crammed with shelves, and most of the books appear to be in English. Remus browses enthusiastically, sternly reminding himself that he has only so much money.

But one title catches his eye. He buys it, tucks it away in his case, and goes to find something to eat before braving the train station.

In the village, cool from his nightly bath and comfortable in the wandlight, he opens _Man-eaters of Kumaon_ and begins to read.

Remus spent his childhood reading the lurid tales of werewolf hunters through the ages. His parents thought it an exceptionally disturbing habit--and they were right--but as most of those tales were tied to the rumours and myths they themselves followed in their quietly desperate search for a cure, they could hardly scold him. He spent his adolescence listening eagerly to Professor Kettleburn's stories of adventure and intrigue, lengthy tales of tracking magical beasts in far-away lands. But by the time he left Hogwarts, his interest had faded, replaced by a jaded, disappointed and cynical view of Kettleburn's colleagues and predecessors. He decided they were a disagreeable, delusional lot, the Francis Macombers of the wizarding world, measuring the worth of their lives by the number of trophies and talons they claimed, plunging into danger certain they would discover the ultimate religious, spiritual, physical and sexual satisfaction by firing off a flashy Felling Spell just moments before the graphorn charged.

Mapping the Pakhari heartwood--as he has begun to think of it--Remus tries to ignore the growing worry that he is no better than these men. He tells himself that mapping a heartwood has a magical purpose entirely separate from deliberately and systematically hunting a creature that is doing nothing more than reacting to adverse circumstances by expanding its diet and range.

But in his shabby bungalow at the edge of the jungle, accompanied by cockroaches, geckos and a beetle that looks as if its exoskeleton was fashioned by a Muggle automobile designer in the 1940s, Remus is enraptured. He finds himself wishing he could have met this Colonel Corbett who so earnestly praises his quarry as a "large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage". Remus has no fear of tigers, but the poetic words and ruthless images have him sitting upright and turning pages well into the night, until his eyes smart with exhaustion. Finally, he sets the book on the floor beside the map, speaks, "_Nox_," and lays back to sleep.

A line slips into his mind, a sentence he quickly passed in his eagerness to find the Champawat man-eater, that bold tigress responsible for over four hundred deaths. Sitting up and whispering, "_Lumos_," Remus retrieves the book from the floor and thumbs through the first chapter.

_I have a tale to tell of that bungalow,_ Corbett wrote,_ but I will not tell it here, for this is a book of jungle stories, and tales 'beyond the laws of nature' do not consort well with such stories._

Remus looks up at the geckos on the wall. He wonders if they are the same two lizards, every night. They have no distinguishing characteristics, as far as he can see.

He closes the book, sets it down and extinguishes the light.

_A curious thing for a Muggle hunter to write_, he thinks, slowly shutting his eyes.

* * *

Remus is late returning to the village. He has found a large, complex section of heartwood and is doing his best to trace its borders without becoming mired in the boundary region. But mired he becomes, unwilling to give up. The moon is waxing and in a few days a driver will come to bring him to Nainital, where, a letter from Mr. Chandrasekhar assures him, "Arrangements have been made." It is growing dark when he makes his way out of the jungle and onto the road, a mere mile from where he had entered eight hours before but tired enough to know he has trekked ten times that distance.

A young woman is walking along the road in the opposite direction, a dark shawl covering her face. Remus nods his hello, which she shyly returns; he recognises her but does not know her name. The women of the village and surrounding hills are not as eager to talk to him as the men and children are.

Kicking at the dusty road, he lets his thoughts wander, wondering as he does each day about the curious spatial and temporal characteristics of the heartwood. He has been unable to determine if the jungle actually folds back on itself or merely stretches and shifts to frustrate nosy explorers. There are numerous theories in the magical world to explain how a man could walk for ten days across heartwood and emerge on the other side no more than a league from where he entered. But they are all just that: theories.

Remus' stomach grumbles and he thinks ahead to the hot, simple meal in Rakesh's home, with endless saucers of spicy _chai_ poured by Rakesh's smiling mother. He will mention to Rakesh tonight that his is going to Nainital in a few days to meet with Mr. Chandrasekhar, the man who is funding his endeavours in Pakhari. He looks forward to bathing at the pump, to washing his shirt and hanging it to dry, to reading Jim Corbett by wandlight and falling asleep.

A scream shatters the night.

Remus spins around. His heart accelerates and he takes a few running steps before stopping and forcing his mind to catch up with instinct. The scream definitely came from behind him--ahead of him now--down the shadowed stretch of road he has just passed. The road where the young woman is walking.

There is another scream, long and high and chilling.

From the opposite direction, Remus hears shouts from the village, and he begins to run. The woman screams again--woman or creature, he cannot tell--and he quickens his pace, ignoring the protests of his tired muscles. The road enters a stretch of jungle, the same heartwood edge he mapped less than an hour before. Remus lifts his wand and shouts, "_Lumos!_" A faint light shines ahead of him.

He sees her feet first, on the side of the road, and his heart leaps into his throat. A few more steps and he realises she is still attached to her feet, but the rest of her body is obscured by a black shape. Remus stops abruptly and points his wand.

"_Stupefy!_"

The creature flows. It does not so much move as shift, a rippling shape blacker than the night, curving down and lifting its head all at once, resting its forelegs on the ground and arching, cat-like, when the spell strikes. Long claws carve deep furrows into the road. Two yellow eyes meet Remus', glowing from a face that is shockingly human despite the fangs curving upward from its lower jaw, despite its shimmering, rippling, mesmerizing black skin, a face that has no edge, blurring seamlessly into the shadows. Between its forelegs, the woman is dead, her head crushed, one of her arms mangled.

Remus raises his wand again as the creature folds back on itself, and shouts, "_Laqueus!_" A web of golden thread leaps from the end of his wand, enveloping the creature and shrinking to ensnare it. With a shriek of frustration, the _kali vastu_ lashes out with its forelegs--Remus sees the claws, long, black and shining with blood--and it rips through the magical net as if it were cobwebs.

Remus tries to Stun it again as the creature leaps toward him. He takes a stumbling step backwards, but he is not fast enough. The _kali vastu_ knocks him to the ground and crouches over him. A wild fury explodes in Remus and he struggles violently, kicking at the creature's hind legs. Its breath is hot on his face and smells of earth and blood.

Even though one clawed foreleg has his right arm pinned to the ground, Remus twists his wrist and gasps, "_Sanguinis!_"

A shimmer of red light passes over the creature, illuminating the inside of its mouth as it takes in a breath to shriek again, and its cry this time is one of pain. It reels, spraying hot blood on Remus' face as the Bleeding Curse strikes, and bounds backward. Gathering the woman's body in its front legs and rolling smoothly away, it vanishes into the jungle.

Remus scrambles to his feet and darts after it, throwing light ahead of him. He doesn't see the _kali vastu_ until it leaps, ape-like, bounding off the trunk of a tree to his left and knocking him sideways. His head strikes a tree as he falls to the ground.

Men's voices on the road rouse Remus from his daze, and he struggles to stand. Remus growls in frustration; the creature is gone, its rich, dark scent faded. When he bends down to retrieve his wand, a wave of dizziness washes over him, and he leans against the tree for support. One of the men ventures off the road to help him, asking, "Mr. Lupin? _Kali vastu_?" The terrified group stares at him with wide eyes. Remus frowns, then realises that his face is covered with the creature's blood, as well as some of his own from where his forehead struck the tree. One man says something and motions to the others.

Remus barely hears their words. He is watching the jungle, fighting the predatory urge to chase the creature into the night, forcing himself to listen to the sensible part of his mind that knows he is too unsteady and too shaken to follow.

"Mr. Lupin. Mr. Lupin, here."

The men have formed a tight half-circle near the edge of the road.

The woman's shawl is tangled in a bush, wet with blood. In the dirt beside it, in its own crimson patch of mud, is a single torn, delicate, curving finger.


	3. Chapter 3

Her name was Lakshanya, seventeen years old, and she was the cause of much strife in her family. She wanted to go to university in Haryana to become an engineer; she hoped to design water projects for the Himalayan hill stations so the women wouldn't have to spend half each day carrying water on their heads. Her mother supported the plan, certain that she would find a wealthy Punjabi man to marry, but her father did not want his daughter so far from home. When she was attacked, she was defying her father, sneaking to entrust a neighbour with a letter to the university in Chandigarh.

All this Remus learns from Rakesh as the men of the village search the jungle. He knows they won't find anything, but he searches with them. He is certain they are angry with him for not killing the creature when he had the chance, although they seem quite impressed that he fought it and survived. As twilight nears, they return to Pakhari, Remus and Rakesh trailing behind the disappointed crowd.

"Your map," Rakesh says.

Remus waits.

"The _kali vastu_ lives in the dark places the jungle." Rakesh pauses. "Places we do not go."

"I know," Remus tells him.

Remus does not know what Rakesh has told the villagers, but they seem satisfied that he is doing what he can. And however little it is, he is doing more than they can. For the next few days, he continues to map, and the heartwood begins to coalesce on the parchment. There are no patches of heartwood actually disconnected from the rest; these would surely wither and die. But the continuity of the forest is tenuous and strained, resembling a budding amoeba or an untamed horklump colony. Remus marks the attack locations and calculates how often the _kali vastu_ needs to feed on human-sized prey. No more than every few weeks, he decides, and explains this to Rakesh two days before the full moon, while waiting in the village for Mr. Chandrasekhar's driver from Nainital.

"When you return from Nainital, you will go into the jungle?"

Remus hesitates. He is not entirely sure how to penetrate the border of the heartwood, and he certainly doesn't know how to kill the _kali vastu_. But he says, "Yes," and feels slightly guilty for the half-lie.

The driver arrives shortly after noon. His name is Salil, and he is driving one of the curiously-styled black vehicles that looks as if it's been lumbering around on Indian roads since the 1950s. He diligently wipes all the dust from the car with a dirty rag while Remus is fetching his case from the bungalow. As they drive away on the rutted track, Salil reveals that he is a wizard himself, and tells Remus in very rapid, very broken English that Mr. Chandrasekhar is an important man in the wizarding community, holding some official title that sounds, on Salil's galloping tongue, like "Second Half-Secretary of Mutative Presumptions". Remus spend a few moments wondering what sort of Presumptions would be considered Mutative, then remembers that he is in an Indian car, with an Indian driver, on a narrow, winding Indian road, and concentrates on his plan of escape should the driver's chatter inadvertently cause a plunge into the ravine.

Remus holds his breath for about an hour, eyeing the signs painted on the road-cuts with trepidation: _Better to arrive late than dead!_ He wonders if the Hindi lettering says the same thing, or if loosely translated road signs are just another aspect of the Indian experience that Fangworthy neglected to mention. But as they descend into Nainital, Remus admits that Fangworthy wasn't entirely exaggerating his praise of the "jewel of Kumaon". The town is a collection of pretty, colourful buildings climbing the hills around a large green lake. From the road, Remus can see a lakeside promenade crowded with tourists.

Salil explains, in his stumbling rapid-fire English, that the lake is called Naina Tal because it is believed to be one of the emerald green eyes of Sati, Shiva's wife. Intrigued, Remus asks how her eye came to rest in the Himalayan foothills.

Salil enthusiastically tells the story of how Sati immolated herself at Haridwar because her family offended Shiva, and Shiva took her charred remains in his many arms and began a wild, grief-stricken dance that threatened to destroy the world. To stop the dance and save the world, Vishnu took the body from Shiva and chopped it up, scattering the remains across India.

Remus does not ask where her second eye landed, or any of the other pieces.

Salil turns away from the main road before they reach the heart of town. A narrow lane leads to a tall iron gate; he stops the car and jumps out to open the gate, then stops again and jumps out to close it after he has driven through. "Mr. Chandrasekhar's estate," he says. The lane curves up the hillside toward a two-story yellow Colonial house fronted by ragged flowering bushes and cracked cement steps.

"Mr. Chandrasekhar is away until this evening," Salil says, taking Remus' case and leading him inside. The entrance hall is cool and dim. Its high ceiling and elaborate woodwork paint a picture of grandeur, but the effect is ruined by the water-stained plaster, blistering wallpaper and crooked staircase. Salil shows Remus to the second floor and into an uncomfortably hot room with lurid yellow walls. "The WC is here," he points to a closed door across the hall. "Please, if you need anything, tell me or Alok in the kitchen. Mr. Chandrasekhar will be back for supper. Eight o'clock. You would like tea? Perhaps you wish to walk to the lake?"

Remus nods thoughtfully. He feels the same edgy restlessness that always accompanies the approach of the full moon and decides a long walk will definitely help. Remus washes his hands and face while Salil brings tea and some dry chocolate biscuits.

Standing at one of the windows, Remus sips the tea and watches the light play through the leaves. He tries to see it as a thing of beauty, tries to appreciate the wide bed and hot tea and running water, but a sick, squirming sensation is growing in his gut. This is no holiday. This is the day before the full moon, and already his skin feels tight and itchy, as if it doesn't quite fit.

The teacup rattles in its saucer as Remus sets it down. He wrenches two of the windows open, cracking a layer of paint that has sealed them shut for uncounted years and hopes a cross-breeze will clear the stifling air by the time he returns. He hurries down the steps and out of the house.

Remus walks briskly and reaches the lakeshore in less than half an hour. He forces himself to slow down, to watch the strolling families and enthusiastic vendors, to enjoy the view of the boats on the water. He is amused by the impressive wooden "Nainital Yacht Club" on the lakeshore and briefly wonders what stubborn Englishman succeeded in starting a yacht club in the Himalayan foothills.

Soon his amusement fades, though, and he finds himself standing at the edge of the promenade, hands in tight fists in his pockets. From here, so close to the water, the lake in no way resembles an eye. Yet he thinks of charred, green-eyed Sati lying beneath the land and gazing upward at the flawless blue sky as children scramble all about her, shrieking in Hindi and disregarding their parents' pleas to stay away from the water.

He tries to ignore the children's shouts. _It is ridiculous_, he tells himself firmly, _to be this anxious a full thirty hours before the moon rises_. There is no need for the tension in his neck or the soreness in his jaw that comes from clenching his teeth while he paces the promenade.

A painful knot grows in his chest and he is overcome by the sudden, suffocating desire to be laying on the sofa in the London flat, his head resting in a familiar lap, eyes closed against the afternoon sunlight, half-listening to murmured assurances and funny, distracting stories, enjoying the sensation of one strong hand resting possessively on his waist, the other combing gently through his hair.

Remus rubs a hand over his face, taking in a long, slow breath. The pain in his chest does not recede, but it shifts, as he exhales, into white-hot anger at his own traitorous instincts.

Six months have shown him that he cannot control his memories; he cannot rein in his emotions this close to the full moon. Yet he tries, and he will continue to try, he promises himself, until the hands, whispers and laughter fade, until the memories are pale and vague, easily pushed aside.

Remus turns decisively away from the lakefront and strides through the narrow, crowded streets of Nainital. He scowls at the squalor tucked into every shaded alley, the quiet resentment in every shopkeeper's imploring smile. From within, the hill station's lustre has faded. He walks until the heat and humidity are lead weights on his shoulders. As the sun is setting, he returns to Mr. Chandrasekhar's estate, relishing the pain in his moon-tight muscles and walking recklessly in the roadway, trusting the mad Indian drivers to either swerve or recognise a viable target when they see one. The gate screeches as he pulls it open and a sharp edge catches the palm of his left hand. Closing the gate and licking away the spot of blood, he walks slowly up to the house, his manic energy draining away as if someone has pulled the stop.

It is not yet eight o'clock, so he climbs up to his room without pause. The open windows have helped, and the air inside is fresh at least, if still unreasonably hot for May. Remus shuts the door and collapses face-down on the bed. The duvet smells like dust and mould. He turns his head to the side and concentrates on breathing very, very slowly. On the wall beside the window is one of those garish prints of some blue-skinned deity with too many arms and a large, misshapen head. Remus decides that the Hindu icons are surely the ugliest godly representations in the world. His fist tightens around the edge of the blanket, and he shuts his eyes. The nauseating yellow walls are replaced by a shadowy, raging vision of Shiva dancing to destroy the world in his grief.

* * *

A quiet knock wakes Remus some time later. He is alert and upright in an instant, heart racing, gripping his wand and gaping stupidly at the unfamiliar room. Salil's quiet voice announces, through the door, that Mr. Chandrasekhar has returned and supper will be served in ten minutes. Does Mr. Lupin care to wash before coming down?

Remus mumbles an affirmative reply, shoving his wand back into his pocket and holding a trembling hand before his face. It has been months since he last awoke like that, leaping from the bed in full expectation of Death Eaters blasting through the door. Taking in a slow breath, he is still for a moment, until his limbs feel less like tight-strung wire and more like flesh and bone. With a frown he pulls at his shirt, damp with sweat, and goes through his case for a clean one before washing up and going down to supper.

Mr. Chandrasekhar is already seated at the massive, ornate dining room table, a spread of dishes before him. He stands when Remus enters, several inches shorter than Remus and wearing a suit--a fine suit, by Indian standards--with a silk tie. He smiles broadly and takes Remus' hand in his own. "Mr. Lupin, it is a pleasure to meet you at last. I trust the drive from Pakhari was enjoyable?"

Remus returns the smile and takes the chair Mr. Chandrasekhar indicates. "Quite enjoyable," he lies with no compunction. He considers his next words carefully. Remus has long ago learned that most people prefer him to stammer, apologise or pretend he doesn't know what lycanthropy is all about; guarded euphemisms are all they can handle. But Remus has long since given up caring about what most people prefer, so he adds, "I must thank you for making these arrangements. There is no safe place in the village for me to spend the full moon."

He watches his host's reaction.

Mr. Chandrasekhar continues to smile and sits at the head of the table. "Please, please, do not mention it. Professor Kettleburn is a very good friend, a very old friend, and he speaks highly of you. Did you know, we were students together at the G.B. Goodwing Institute in Leeds? Please," he motions to the food, "help yourself."

Remus spoons some _raita_ onto his plate as Mr. Chandrasekhar pours the tea. It is, Remus notes, plain black tea, not the milky-sweet spiced _chai_ he has grown used to in the village. "I didn't know you were schooled in England."

"Oh, yes. And many years later, Kentworth--Professor Kettleburn--came here, to Uttar Pradesh."

"The occamy."

Chuckling, Mr. Chandrasekhar passes a plate of _chapati _to Remus. "The occamy, and my beautiful sister, yes. Alas, she had already married a rich man--a banker with Gringotts India, in Lucknow--and Kent went back to England with the trophy only, not the wife."

Remus is interested in this bit of gossip about his former professor and presses Mr. Chandrasekhar for more details. The conversation evolves comfortably, Mr. Chandrasekhar expressing the appropriate shock and regret at Remus' graphic account of the class in which Kettleburn lost his right leg, while Remus learns a great deal about the wizarding community of India.

"We are not organised," Mr. Chandrasekhar admits, shaking his head. Remus cannot stifle a small laugh. "Ah, yes, you passed through the Ministry offices in Delhi? The very worst of Indian bureaucracy concentrated into one small building. There are many, many powerful wizards in India, but we do not share our gifts, we do not teach our children the skills they need. A young person wishing to learn anything beyond simple charms for cutting grass or drawing water must leave, as I did, and go to France, England or America to learn. Then he returns to the hills officially tainted by western influence."

Remus makes a small sound of regret and is silent while he considers how to broach the next subject.

But Chandrasekhar does it for him. "Tell me, how goes the hunt in Pakhari?"

Rather than answering, Remus asks, "Do you know of the heartwood?"

Chandrasekhar raises his eyebrows in surprise, but answers, "Yes, I do."

"The _kali vastu_\--the creature--lives in the heartwood."

With a sigh, Mr. Chandrasekhar admits, "I suspected as much. I did not write to Kent of my suspicion for fear he would not heed my plea." To Remus this seems a rather thin excuse, but he says nothing and Chandrasekhar continues, "There is an old story told among the wizards of India that the heartwoods once encompassed the whole of the Himalaya--an exaggeration, of course, but even so, there is very little heartwood left in India. The jungle near Pakhari is one of many small, dying bits. It must be difficult to track the _kali vastu_ through the heartwood."

"To tell you the truth," Remus says, "I haven't been able to penetrate the border yet. I've been mapping the boundaries."

"Mapping a heartwood? That is quite a task. Kent did not tell me you have talent in magical cartography."

"It's more of a hobby, really." Remus sips his tea, then adds, "But until I can identify the creature and enter the heartwood, the best I can do is warn the villagers which parts of the jungle to avoid after dark. I hope Professor Kettleburn told you that I am not a hunter."

"He says you are a young man with a gift for magical beasts."

"Being one myself."

Chandrasekhar laughs. "Yes, yes. Though you should be careful with whom you share that information. In India, as in England, werewolves are not welcomed at many tables. _Pagalcandrami_ is the word the Indian wizards use, a slang corruption from the Hindi, meaning roughly 'mad man of the moon'."

"Yet here I am," Remus points out, "at your table."

There is a silence while Chandrasekhar refills the teacups. "You have seen the Ministry in Delhi," he begins. "Did you see the pamphlets? There are piles and piles of pamphlets: restrictions on travel, on charmwork, laws against importing magical texts, tariffs on simple potions ingredients. Do you know why we have so many laws?"

Remus shakes his head.

"What do you know of Indian history?"

Remus admits, sheepishly, "Very little."

"You know about Partition?"

"That I do know."

"It was much worse for the Muggles, of course--Muggles will use their religion to make every conflict worse--but for many centuries, the largest population of wizards in India was in Kashmir. They were very powerful wizards, a learned and ancient sect, but so removed from the world they became unwise in the ways of politics. When they found themselves caught between two nations at war, they reacted very badly and attempted to end the Muggle conflict using magical means."

Remus blinks. "I've never heard that."

"Their attempts were short-lived and disastrous," Chandrasekhar explains. "And largely ignored by the Muggles, who were too busy fleeing, fighting and burning one another to death on trains to notice the magic. But the Kashmiri wizards did succeed in throwing the wizarding population of India into disarray--even more so than the abrupt separation from the British Ministry of Magic had--and I'm afraid the only solution we found was to restrict and regulate, to monitor and disallow anything that might lead to another Kashmiri tragedy." Chandrasekhar pauses. "There are very few wizards in Kashmir now. The old ones have all left; the few that survived Partition relocated to Tibet. The sect is in Lhasa, slowly dying. The young men who remain in Kashmir are a troubled group with very strong ideas about the place of wizards in this world."

Remus is silent.

"I am sorry," Chandrasekhar says suddenly, and he seems truly abashed. "I have spoken carelessly, with wizarding Britain still recovering from its own troubles. Kent tells me you were among those who fought this Dark Wizard--what was his name?"

"Voldemort," Remus says quietly.

Chandrasekhar does not flinch or cringe or shudder at the same, and Remus feels the absurd desire to thank him for that lack of reaction. "Yes. And here I am, rambling like an old man about problems of the past. I beg your pardon."

"There's no need to apologise. But," Remus says, "you did not explain why you invited a--what was the word? _Pagalcandrami--_into your home." He attempts a smile, though it feels more like a grimace.

Chandrasekhar smiles, too, a bit sadly. "It is no great mystery. It is my small way of allowing the magic to return to India. For you are a magical creature, even if most would call you cursed."

Oddly pleased by Chandrasekhar's frank words, Remus finds himself truly smiling. He does not remember the last time--if there ever was a time--when somebody referred to him simply as a "magical creature", rather than "Dark Creature", "beast", or "monster".

"Well, I appreciate your hospitality, whatever your reasons," he says.

Chandrasekhar makes a dismissive gesture. "I should very much like to see this map of yours--when you are finished?" He glances at Remus' plate, which has several spoonfuls of uneaten rice. Remus finishes quickly then hurries upstairs to retrieve the map, feeling contentment settle over him at the prospect of an evening spent discussing magic with Mr. Chandrasekhar. His earlier anxiety, his anger at himself and the approaching moon, disgust with the crumbling old house and crowded hill town, have all faded, and he chides himself for succumbing to mere homesickness in so welcoming and friendly a household. He collects the map and finds Mr. Chandrasekhar with a fresh pot of tea in a book-lined study, the room warmly lit by candles and sconces.

"Let us see then," Chandrasekhar says, as Remus spreads the map on a wide wooden table. "Ah. Why, this is quite wonderful! An impressive bit of magic."

Remus grins at the compliment.

"Where did you learn to do this?"

His grin fades a bit. "In school, some friends and I...took an interest."

"Ah." Chandrasekhar looks at him steadily for a moment but does not pursue it. "So, tell me, what have you learned about the _kali vastu_?"

Remus fills him in quickly on the most recent developments, including the death of the young woman a few days ago. Chandrasekhar purses his lips at this information and shakes his head. "You saw the creature?" he asks.

"Yes. And I've been meaning to ask, is there a chance--are there lethifolds in India? I have never heard of one to act so boldly or to leave parts behind, but it looked a bit like what I've always imagined a lethifold would."

Chandrasekhar replies, "Yes, in India, but not in Uttar Pradesh. Only in the west and south--Kerala, Goa, Karnataka, there are abundant lethifolds in those places, and a rash of incidents about twenty years ago in Madras. There was one report, highly suspect, from the Terai, many years ago. But most believe the lethifold prefers lower elevations."

Nodding, Remus agrees. "That's what I've read. Though it may be related, somehow. It seems to be immune to certain magic. I tried to Stun it and to catch it in a _Laqueus_ snare, but neither of those worked."

"You could not use magic against it?" Chandrasekhar asks, frowning.

Remus hesitates. "The Bleeding Curse affected it," he admits after a moment. When Chandrasekhar does not voice disapproval at using so violent a curse, Remus asks, "Have you ever heard of anything like this, the _kali vastu_, before?"

"No, never," Chandrasekhar says, as Remus expects him to. Chandrasekhar's letter to Kettleburn had suggested as much; after eliminating tigers, leopards, uncharacteristically hostile Himalayan bears and most magical predators, very few options remain.

"But." He stops, sips his tea. Remus waits. "I had hoped the creature was not part of the heartwood," Chandrasekhar adds, finally. "The heartwoods of the Himalaya are stubborn and powerful."

He seems to be leading up to something, so Remus does not reply.

"I have a friend in Haridwar, an old man, a very powerful wizard. He did not go to Lhasa with the rest of the Kashmiri sect. He has studied the heartwoods some, and he may be able to help. I believe he is in Dharamsala for another week or two, but he will return to Haridwar soon. In his library he has Montmorency Maxwell's Indian journals, the originals, not the heavily abridged copies that one can find in bookshops in England. Maxwell is perhaps the only scholar who studied the heartwood in any depth, and my friend Matsyamohandra has continued the work, a bit."

The name tugs at Remus' memory, and he asks, "Not the same Maxwell who wrote _A Brief Guide to the Animagus Transfiguration_?"

"Indeed it is," Chandrasekhar confirms. "He spent his last fifty years or so in India, mainly Calcutta. Many of his later experiments were conducted in the Himalaya. You have an interest in advanced transfiguration?"

"A theoretical interest only. I've never been very talented with transfiguration," Remus says quickly. "But, this friend of yours," he continues, eager to change the subject, "he has studied the heartwoods?"

"Indeed. Perhaps you would like to speak with him?"

"I would love to."

"I will contact him and arrange for you to go to Haridwar. Have you been? No? It is a very powerful place. Even the Muggles know this; the Hindus consider it one of their most holy cities. If you bathe in Ganga on the sacred _ghats_, all of your sins will be washed away." Chandrasekhar appears to be amused by this belief. "But it is a very important city for wizards as well. You will enjoy visiting, and my friend Matsyamohandra will welcome you."

They speak for some time longer, then Chandrasekhar offers to take Remus outside to see the small building in which he'll spend the following night. They go by torchlight into the forest behind the house, which is alive with the night sounds Remus has grown accustomed to. There is a low wooden building set some distance through the trees, with a single door and no windows. "Before the Muggles brought electricity," Chandrasekhar explains, pushing the door open, "the man who lived here, an Englishman, used this as an icehouse in the summer." The walls are thick and sturdy, and Chandrasekhar assures Remus it can be magically warded and silenced. He waits for Remus to nod his approval before shutting the door and gesturing back to the house. As they walk, he says, "I do have some books in my library, historical books, some of which may make mention of the heartwood. You are welcome to them, tomorrow."

Remus thanks him and bids him good night.

* * *

Salil brings tea and toast to Remus' room in the morning, which Remus accepts gratefully despite the low-grade nausea that always troubles him the day of the full moon. It is still quite early, so after shaving and dressing he walks into Nainital to stand on the promenade for a few minutes, watching the vendors set up their carts and spread cheap religious icons and strange plastic Muggle items on blankets. But he doesn't linger; he returns to Chandrasekhar's house and finds a stack of dusty books in the study. The kitchen boy, Alok, sets a fresh pot of tea on the table, and Remus begins to read. He makes a few notes but finds, for the most part, information about the heartwoods in India is much the same as it is in England: limited to a few dismissive, offhand comments about the "great mystery in the jungle" or "the dark places of the hills". Around noon, Remus refuses Alok's offer of lunch and returns to his bedroom to rest. He falls asleep with the Corbett paperback on his chest.

Tense muscles and crawling skin wake him a few hours later. It is mid-afternoon and the heat of the day is unforgiving. Remus takes his book to the veranda in the back of the house to escape the airless bedroom. He pulls a chair into the shade and sits down to read, steadfastly ignoring the growing discomfort in his muscles and the prickling sensation that has, since the age of five, made him imagine thick, rough fur straining to break through the surface of his skin. For several months as a boy he refused to go to the Muggle school on the days leading up to the full moon, even when he otherwise felt fine, for fear that the wolf's coat would erupt through his skin and his secret would be revealed.

Alok comes out to ask if Remus would like some tea, and he accepts, reflecting that however compulsive the British may be about their tea, they have nothing on the Indians. He opens the book to his marked page and begins to read.

_Few of us, I imagine, have escaped that worst of all nightmares in which, while our limbs and vocal cords are paralysed with fear, some terrible beast in monstrous form approaches to destroy us_; _the nightmare from which, sweating fear in every pore, we waken with a cry of thankfulness to Heaven that it was only a dream._

Remus looks up, into the deep green of the jungle. In the distance, lit by a shaft of sunlight, there is a cluster of white orchids in full bloom. He knows how the passage will end. The girl on the cliff cannot escape; she can only watch in mute fear as the tiger stalks along the narrow stone ledge, a hungry grin on its magnificent face.

How strange, Remus thinks, that his greatest worry had once been the humiliating laughter of his Muggle schoolmates should they discover the fur crawling, live as worms, beneath his skin. The fear came later because they told him it must. His parents, the Healers, the books he read by torchlight when he was supposed to be sleeping, the gleeful shrieks of terror as a Gryffindor fourth year pretended to be a slavering werewolf, chasing laughing girls through the common room, oblivious to the scrawny, trembling, pale-faced first year hiding behind his Astronomy chart in the corner -- every one of them told him the same thing: we fear you, and you must therefore fear yourself.

So he had, and his fear became a living, pulsing black terror that grew and stretched to fill every corner of his mind.

Until, at some point, Remus began to approach the transformations with a calm that his parents and friends found decidedly eerie. The full moon became the tiger creeping along on the cliff. There is only so much one can dread the inevitable.

Remus goes into the old icehouse well before the sun sets, for Chandrasekhar's peace of mind as much as his own. Chandrasekhar seals the building magically, says something reassuring and meaningless, then casts an Imperturbable Charm, and the familiar sounds of the jungle vanish.

The silence is disconcerting. India, Remus has learned, is never silent. The jungle is always alive with noise: insects and birds, deer and pigs and monkeys, villagers calling across the valley, the rhythmic chopping of grass, the lumbering gait of the buffalo. He has grown used to these sounds and learned to listen for them as he walks the edges of the heartwood; he is comforted by their unfailing presence. But Chandrasekhar's charm is effective, and Remus strains for several minutes to hear anything beyond his own quickened breath before finally focusing on an almost imperceptible scratching in one corner: a beetle burrowing in the dirt.

Almost as bad as the heavy silence is the heat. Remus removes his clothes, folding them neatly in a corner--not the beetle's corner, for he has no wish to disturb its industry--and settles back on the dirt, staring at the splinters of sunlight coming through the roof. He is aware of the thin film of sweat over his body, so he thinks about the coldest he has ever been. Lying in wait outside a January meeting of suspected Death Eaters in Inverness. Sprinting from the Hogwarts lake to the castle, drenched and nearly hypothermic after the splashy conclusion of a snowball fight that landed four boys in the infirmary, laid up for two days with fevers and hacking coughs. Waking up to the brush of frosted grass on his cheek, naked and lost in the Forbidden Forest after one of their early full moon excursions, before stag and dog had learned to control the wolf. Vividly he remembers the rush of fear at the sound of approaching footsteps, followed by relief as a centaur stepped into the clearing and looked down at him with an expression of bemused curiosity. That was when he first learned about the remnant heartwood in the centre of the Forbidden Forest; the centaur spoke of dark places in the wood where the creatures do not go, where time and space were bent and unstable. Shivering and hugging himself awkwardly while the centaur rambled, Remus inched sideways into a patch of weak sunlight that broke through the trees and tried to think of polite way to extract his cold, naked self from the conversation. The centaur was startled and Remus nearly shouted with joy when they heard a voice calling, "_Moony! Moony, where the hell are you? Remus!_" accompanied by the racket of long teenage limbs crashing through the trees. A relieved face appeared from a behind a tree, black hair damp with perspiration, breath a puff of smoke on the November dawn. "_There you are! Christ. Bloody hell, you gave us a scare._" A warm cloak was placed around his shoulders, and Remus could barely speak for his chattering teeth. He hobbled painfully out of the clearing on bloodied, half-frozen feet, glancing back to see that the centaur had vanished into the gold-lit wood. He stumbled and a long arm caught him around the waist, holding him up. "_Fuck, mate, don't ever do that again. Ever. Spent the whole night--Merlin, just don't do it again, okay?_" He promised. He tried.

They learned, eventually, that he had no control.

Lying on the dirt floor in the abandoned icehouse, Remus examines his memory and ponders the peculiar cowardice of the human mind. It wasn't James who found him in the forest that morning, though he struggles in vain to place James' face in that frozen winter sunrise. There were other times, other mornings, when it was James or Peter who helped him back to the Shack. But not that November morning. His feet had ached for days afterwards and a shadow of guilt tugged his mind--_what if I had run into Hogsmeade?_\--but it wasn't a bad morning. There is nothing about the shivering, stumbling walk back through the forest that deserves to be twisted and wronged and made untruthful in his memory.

Nothing except the face.

Remus closes his eyes, listens to the steadily burrowing beetle in the corner, and waits for moonrise.

* * *

His mother is singing. Part of him--in a deep hidden corner, a fierce red glow of instinct--tries to take the words and change them, swallow them into his gut and stretch his neck in reply and _howl_. But his throat, when he tries to answer, manages only a rough pathetic bleat. A cool hand soothes the hair back from his eyes. She stops singing but it's not his mother anymore, though still a woman, saying, "_Now you know what happens when you mix too much boomslang skin into the Daft Draft, I trust you won't do it again, Mr. Gudgeon?_" There is a warm weight against his right arm. He tries to shift it but his concentration is broken by the press of warm gentle kisses down the line of his jaw, and then there are long slow strokes of a canine tongue on his shoulder. He raises a hand to push the dog away, protesting with a mumbled, "Mmmph."

"Mr. Lupin, are you awake?"

_Mister Loop-in_. Remus opens his eyes. Salil is crouched beside him in that seemingly painless flat-footed squat that all Indians can manage, rinsing a wet rag in a basin of water. Remus is on his side; he tries to roll over and finds that his back is against the rough wooden wall of the icehouse. Closing his eyes again, he permits himself one soft groan, then takes in a deep breath and sits up.

"Thank you," he says, looking around confusedly for his clothes. He is curiously unembarrassed to be naked, dirty and bleeding before Salil's candid gaze. Nothing like a few weeks of bathing at an outdoor pump in full view of the village to cure his shyness, he thinks. Salil hands over his trousers and shirt, and Remus notices the sunlight shining through the open door. He remembers transforming back at sunrise, bewildered and fascinated by the plethora of new scents indelibly etched into his wolf-mind. His fingers ache, and his nails are filthy and torn. To his surprise, he remembers clawing at the wooden walls when the moon first rose and later trying to dig underneath when he caught the scent of some animal outside. Ordinarily, his full moon memories are fleeting, snippets of scenes and sensations that he can piece together, with great concentration, to form a vague dream-like recollection of the night. But this morning his memories are lucid and strong.

Remus rests on the dirt for a moment after pulling his trousers on, and Salil begins dabbing at his shoulder with the rag. "No, please," Remus says, wincing. "I can clean it with magic. Inside." Salil's eyes widen with understanding, and Remus realises just how true Chandrasekhar's words were the night before regarding the state of magical education in India. But for now, he wants to get off the ground and into the soft bed, so he struggles to his feet and allows Salil to help him into the house. Alok brings tea while Remus is investigating his injuries and performing the familiar healing charms, and Remus drinks only half a cup before falling asleep again.


	4. Chapter 4

The dawn is cool, clear and silent. A few hours of rain the night before have cleansed the air of dust. Remus fills his water bottle at the pump and puts rice and _chapati_, wrapped in thick green leaves, in the makeshift bag he's fashioned from a length of cotton. The newly-sharpened machete is in his belt, and his wand is in his back pocket. Tucking the map in the bag alongside the food, he slings the strap over his shoulder and starts up the valley, walking in the damp grass beside the road to avoid the mud.

The largest contiguous section of heartwood is located about two miles from the village, beyond a small field where Remus has often stopped to talk to the old man who grows ginger-root there. The edge of the jungle is lined with mango trees, and the old man tells Remus proudly that every year his mangoes are ripe earlier and longer than any others in the valley. Remus was delighted to learn that the man remembers the days when the _sahib_ hunter, Corbett, protected these hills from rogue tigers, and the old man was equally delighted to find a new audience for his stories. This morning, Remus stoops to collect a few mangoes that have fallen to the ground, slipping them into his bag, and calls a good morning to the man smoking in his doorway.

He walks into the jungle until he can no longer see the field through the trees, then stops. Inhaling deeply, he scents the chill air, the rich damp earth and subtle hint of flowers. The morning calls of songbirds mingle with the sporadic patter of droplets falling from leaves. Remus peers into the mottled pattern of shadow and light, appreciating the way each leaf quavers in crisp relief.

There was something different about this full moon. Something changed, and Remus has spent two days trying to figure out what it is. His self-inflicted injuries were still severe, although there were more bruises from flinging himself against the wall than bites and scratches. However, for the first time in his life, he _remembers_ throwing himself against the magically-fortified wooden walls, clawing desperately at the dirt in an attempt to dig out, barking and howling until his voice failed, greedily gulping the aroma of humans though it was too faint to be fresh prey. He remembers the scent of the animal rooting around outside--a pig, most likely, though he isn't sure how he knows that--and he remembers the instinct that ached in every muscle of his wolf-form, the instinct that screamed, _We shouldn't be here, we should be outside, we should be hunting!_ He has turned these thoughts over in his mind for two days now, examining them with as much objectivity as he can muster. He has no explanation for his newfound wolf-awareness; he considers the proximity of the heartwood, but seven years of transforming near--and sometimes within--the Forbidden Forest had no such effect, so he is doubtful. The clarity is unlike anything in his experience, more vibrant than the indistinct, cherished recollections of running wild with a stag and a dog, more sensible than the frantic flashes of caged desperation that pervaded his childhood nightmares.

He pointedly ignores the fierce blood-lust he felt when facing the _kali vastu_. He has no proof the two strange experiences are related.

Even though the memories creep into his mind at quiet moments, Remus tries to push them aside and concentrate on the jungle. There was no sign of the _kali vastu_ during his brief absence, not so much as a scream from the jungle. The villagers keep to their homes after dark, and the young woman's funeral is over, her single finger cremated.

Remus has mapped all that he can, and it is time to take the next step. Recovering in Chandrasekhar's house, he realised that he could link simple _Mobilis_ and _Temporus_ charms together to track the shifting edges of the jungle in relation to the stationary village. When the joint charms were cast, the map stopped quivering and shuddering like the surface of a pond, although the borders still creep slowly if he watches long enough. He doesn't yet know if the map is shifting accurately, but it is the best he can do, for now.

All that remains is to find a way into the heartwood.

Remus has never been impulsive. He knows he has never possessed the boldness to face a problem like a bull charging a matador, nor does he understand the preference for flashy, attention-seeking tactics when a quiet word or sly manoeuvre would be just as effective. He has always been one to suffer his colds in silence, to stay after class to ask a question rather than interrupt the lecture, to spend hours perfecting charms of concealment and camouflage while his friends researched the best way to make paint pots explode. It was easy enough, in school, to disappear behind mates who were braver, brighter and louder than he. It was easy enough, later, to be the miserable, silent half of a raging fight, arms folded defensively across his chest while he formulated calm, logical, irrefutable counterarguments that he never voiced. It was easy, before, to skirt the borders, avoid the trenches, keep his head low, his nose clean and his skin more or less intact.

_And just look where that got you._ The voice in his mind is uncharacteristically nasty.

He is walking headlong into the heartwood. The people of Pakhari learned long ago to avoid the dark places of the jungle--partly out of self-preservation but mostly because they lost so many buffalo to its greedy interior--so he has only a vague idea of what to expect. He has identified the largest area of heartwood and is walking straight across its border, because the villagers' breathless stories and historians' imprecise comments and his own careful cartography are just not good enough.

After about half an hour, the sun has risen above the mountains, washing the jungle in damp sparkling light. Remus stops and unrolls the map. The lines denoting the heartwood boundaries seem to be moving more energetically, but, as the motion is almost imperceptible, Remus can't be sure. Wondering what a Locating Spell will tell him, he pulls his wand from his pocket and touches it to the map.

"_Ubilocum_," he says firmly.

A spot of red light flares at the centre of the map then drifts slowly up the valley, wandering back and forth as if searching for something. It eventually settles into a jerky pacing motion at the edge of the heartwood he is trying to enter. Frowning, Remus mutters, "Not a good sign." That spell has never before failed to identify his location. Tapping his wand against his chin, Remus gazes idly into the jungle, then looks down, touches his wand to the parchment again, and says, "_Prossimo locus._"

The map shudders in his hand, glowing blue for a moment before fading. A tiny black cross appears near the red spot moving along the heartwood boundary. The cross doesn't stay put, though; it fades from sight, then reappears in a different place about two inches away. There it blinks uncertainly, just inside the boundary of the heartwood, before fading again and appearing in a third spot. Remus watches the mark's curious behaviour for a bit, trying to discern some sort of pattern or focus to its chosen locations. As far as he can tell, the motion is entirely random, though concentrated around the edge of the heartwood.

A Locating Spell that won't locate and a Point Designation Charm that won't designate are not indicative of a successful day ahead. "Quantum cartography," Remus says after a minute, then sighs and stows the map before continuing.

The early morning chill soon withers under the Indian sun. The land begins to slope upward and the foliage thickens, but Remus neither sees nor feels anything unusual. There is no path to follow, not even an animal trail, and before long he is struggling through thick underbrush. A thorn rips his trouser leg, and he curses, then pulls the machete from his belt and glares at the tangle of shrubs at his feet. He wants to walk in as straight a line as possible, and the daunting ferocity of the thorns makes him wonder if the heartwood is purposefully preventing this.

They do look like ordinary shrubs, if a bit bloodthirsty, so Remus raises the machete and begins to hack his way through.

Twenty or thirty strokes later, he admits that using a machete is not nearly as easy as the villagers make it look. Remus stops for breath, then pulls his wand out of his pocket and points it at the bush. "_Claravius_," he says, tracing a line in the air with the wand.

A trail of green light follows the tip of his wand.

The leaves and thorns shiver menacingly.

"_Claravius_," he tries again.

If bushes had eyes, this one would be glaring defiantly. Maybe even a little smugly.

The shrubs are, if anything, drawing closer together as Remus attempts to magically separate them. Remus looks at his wand with a frown and gives it a wave that produces a shower of golden sparks. He mutters, "Useless, unreliable charmwork," and shoves it back in his pocket. Raising the machete again, Remus sets to work.

His progress is slow, hacking through the bushes and ascending a hill that is growing steadily steeper. Once, he pulls out the map again and attempts to designate a _Prossimo locus_, but the result is just another quantum cross leaping artfully alongside the first. Sometime around midmorning, judging by the position of the sun in the sky, he tears his shirt for the fourth time on a blade-like thorn and decides to spare the sleeves further damage. He removes the shirt and tucks it into the waistband of his trousers at his back.

A few minutes later, Remus realises that there are no mosquitoes.

He pauses mid-swing. No mosquitoes alight on his skin or whine in his ear. There is no locust-like hum filling the jungle, no background symphony of rustling, scratching, chirping and buzzing. Remus lowers the machete, suddenly aware of his own deep breaths. The jungle is, in fact, completely silent.

Slipping the machete into his belt, Remus leans down and examines the earth. He turns over a few loose stones, sifts through the damp dirt and finds nothing. No beetles, no ants, no spiders. He takes a few steps to the side and peers under a few more stones. Still nothing. Telling himself confidently that the lack of six- and eight-legged creatures is a curious observation, not a reason to panic, Remus begins to search more methodically. He looks closely at the bark of the jungle trees and crawls on his knees to inspect the roots of the thorny bushes. He pushes his hand into one leafy shrub, attempting to shove the branches back.

The bush bursts outward in a violent explosion of shrieks.

Remus stumbles back, falling hard against the trunk of a mango tree, and watches a blue Himalayan magpie thump its wings angrily up to a branch overhead, scolding him raucously. After his heart has resumed beating, Remus exhales in a choked laugh, "Bloody _bird!_" He stands up and brushes the dirt from his trousers, notes that the machete could very well have impaled his thigh in the graceless fall, and wonders if perhaps his belt isn't the best place to carry the blade. Blood still racing, Remus aims one last glare at the indignant magpie, upon whose wings he places blame for the renewed ache in his fading bruises, and resumes his painstaking climb. He tries not to watch every step for insects but notices their absence nonetheless, silently trying to convince himself that he is terribly foolish for worrying over the lack of bugs when a few weeks ago he would have rejoiced.

After another thirty minutes or so of battling the bushes, Remus is no nearer the summit of the hill. He finds a smooth stone and sits down, catching his breath a moment before drinking from the water bottle. He cleans the blade of the machete with his handkerchief and begins to peel a mango, wiping the juice on his trousers as it drips over his hands. Tossing a sliver of peel into the jungle, Remus listens to the quiet sound it makes hitting the ground.

He raises a slice of fruit to his lips and freezes.

The hair on the back of his neck rises, and he feels a chill, despite the sun. A long, tense moment passes in which Remus listens, watches and inhales as quietly as possible. The jungle is still preternaturally silent. The magpie has ceased squawking. No wind stirs the leaves. He cannot determine what is different, cannot calculate the change.

But Remus knows, without a doubt, that he is being watched.

He concentrates on the jungle before him, lowers his hand, mango slice still balanced on the blade, and studies the pattern of light and dark. He is looking for something that doesn't fit--a shape, a shadow, a movement--but sees nothing amiss. Turning his head with excruciating slowness, he scans the jungle to one side, then the other. He listens for breath, a gentle footstep, a rustle of leaves. Though he knows this is an exceptionally bad time to be thinking of man-eating tigers, he recalls Corbett's dramatic descriptions and looks for patches of red in the shadows. Inhaling slowly, silently, Remus sniffs the air, detecting no trace of the rich, earthy, blood-soaked scent of the _kali vastu_. Frozen with indecision, Remus considers his options. He can turn around, slowly, hoping that whatever is watching him--_stop thinking about tigers_\--doesn't notice the movement. He can reach for his wand and pray that the heartwood allows him to cast just one defensive charm. He can sit here for another hour or so and hope the tiger--_there are no tigers in the heartwood_\--loses interest. He can hold his breath until it hurts and curse the impulse that led him to believe reading Corbett while travelling in Kumaon was a good idea.

Remus glances down and sees the mango in his right hand, crushed to a pulp. Giving it only a second's thought, he flings the mango to the side; it crashes through a bush and tumbles down the slope. The sudden burst of noise surprises the magpie on its branch. As the bird fires off another round of piqued reprimands, Remus stands up and spins around, pulling his wand from his pocket.

He examines the shadows for patches of black and red, shapes out of place, the slightest twitch of motion. There is nothing. The vegetation upslope is thinner than the jungle below, and he is forced to admit that there is no place for anything larger than a dog to hide effectively.

Remus is suddenly struck by how ridiculous he must look, poised in a fighting stance with a machete in one hand, wand in the other, nary a predator in sight. Forcing himself to relax, he slips the blade into his belt and puts his wand back in his pocket. With a sigh, he raises a hand but stops just before spreading mango juice over his face, and wipes the hand on his trousers instead.

It is past noon; Remus notes the position of the sun and frowns. He wonders just how long he was sitting on that stone, imagining nonexistent predators, and decides to start back in order to be out of the jungle by dark. He turns and begins picking his way down the slope. The path he carved has been swallowed by the forest and Remus is soon wielding the machete again, finding it difficult not to overbalance and tumble down the mountainside. It is mid-afternoon before he reaches flatter ground, and even then he's nowhere near the jungle's edge. Remus guesses he's further up the valley than he intended to be, so he turns south, toward the village.

The sound of running water is a surprise. For a moment he considers the possibility that he's heading the wrong direction, but although he can no longer see the fields in the distance, he has no doubt about which way the village lies. He certainly didn't cross a stream on his way up the hill, but there is one in his path now, a cheerful burbling beck that is slightly too wide to jump across and just barely too fast and deep for Remus to feel comfortable wading through.

He walks downstream a ways, looking for stones or a fallen log to serve as a bridge. He finds a likely spot just below a steep cascade, where a jumble of debris has formed a dam for a clear, deep pool. Before risking the crossing, though, Remus decides to eat some of the food he brought with him. He rests in the silence, chewing thoughtfully for a few minutes, then crouches by the pool, cupping his hands to drink. Before touching the water, Remus admires the absolute stillness of the pool, thinking its mirror-like surface is rather remarkable. He lowers his hands into the cool water and lifts them, dripping, to his mouth.

In the ripples, he sees the shadow of a man behind him.

His heart leaps into his throat and Remus spins around, falling forward on his hands when he loses his balance.

There is nobody there.

The jungle is silent; there are no retreating footsteps, no stifled breaths. Casting his gaze about wildly, Remus stares at every tree trunk and leafy branch, searching for any hidden shape, any shadow he might have mistaken for a man. He stands up and takes a few steps forward, hesitating before peering around the nearest tree and into the surrounding jungle. Turing back to the pool, Remus looks into the water again and sees nothing but the dying ripples and wavering reflection of trees. Swallowing hard, he kneels again and leans close to the water; the stones and sand at the bottom of the pool form no man-shaped patterns. With a trembling hand, Remus reaches out to touch the water again, creating another dance of ripples, and sees nothing.

Suddenly aware of the painful dryness in his throat, he cups his hands to drink, glancing over his shoulder just before raising the water to his mouth. After a few mouthfuls, he stands up, nervously surveys the jungle once more and searches for the driest steps across the tangle of sticks at the end of the pool.

The shadows grow long, and Remus quickens his pace, still looking over his shoulder every few minutes. As he walks, he catalogues the unusual characteristics of the heartwood: lack of insects, inconsistent landscape features, some type of magical impediment that makes spellwork difficult. He isn't sure he can include his strange feeling, hours before, of being watched, or the shadow he thought he saw in the pool, but he is beginning to understand why explorers of ages past have carefully avoided descriptions of heartwoods in their texts. An enigmatic sentence such as: _And, ye, we did scout the magical wood though it be dark and secretive in its mysteries,_ is far more impressive than: _There were no bugs and I had a creepy feeling._

He can be sure, however, that the light is fading fast and he has still not reached the edge of the jungle. Walking is not so difficult that he needs the machete, but he is increasingly frustrated with the logs and shrubs that block his path. After a few clumsy stumbles Remus forces himself to calm down and walk quickly, not recklessly, for the edge of the heartwood cannot be far ahead. He simply wandered too far north when he was coming down the hill, distracted by unfounded worries about tigers.

He does not think about how unfamiliar the jungle seems, its trees larger and more gnarled than he is accustomed to.

He does not think about the river that ought not to have been there.

He does not think about the reflection in the pool.

The sun sets.

All at once, the jungle is filled with a cacophony of insects.

Remus stops. Though the noise seems deafening at first, he quickly realises that it is no louder than the usual sounds of the jungle. The buzzing, chirping, rustling, scraping, clattering noises serve as constant reminder that the jungle is always seething with life; he hadn't realised how much he missed them. Lowering to one knee, Remus watches in fascination: ants are scampering up narrow branches; beetles emerge from underneath leaves; a spider lowers itself on a line of silk.

Standing up again, Remus says, "Very odd." His voice sounds muffled, dwarfed by the insects, and he resists the urge to repeat the words louder and more clearly. He resumes walking, more quickly, determined to make it out of the heartwood before night truly falls. But the sky grows dark rapidly, and soon Remus is anxiously watching the shadows, worried that his own noisy footsteps will prevent him from hearing anything else.

Finally, he stops. _We need to make a decision_, he thinks.

Remus frowns. _I need to make a decision_. _Think about it rationally._ While he is reasonably certain which direction he needs to go to reach the edge of the jungle, the heartwood's relentless demonstration of mutable geography means that he is, essentially, lost. Remus considers consulting the map again but dismisses the idea, knowing it will do no good. He does not know how long it will take him to reach the border he should have arrived at hours ago. In the dark, without the sun to navigate by, he runs a greater risk of straying from his chosen direction and wandering around in circles. It is possible he will spend the entire night walking through the jungle and never find the way out.

A mosquito tickles his neck; he is still shirtless. He sets the bag down to pull his shirt back on, and as he is buttoning it he hears a rustle of leaves to his left. He turns his head quickly but sees nothing. As he slips the final button through its hole, he considers his options. _Stop or keep walking. _Jim Corbett would select a tree, fashion a clever rope seat and settle in for a long, painful, sleepless night, rifle in hand, man-eater prowling the darkness. Thinking about the way the _kali vastu_ sprang and bounded against the tree trunks as if weightless, Remus acknowledges that perhaps climbing a tree will not be as effective against this creature as it was against the tigers. He remembers the agonised scream when he cast the _Sanguinis_ curse and wonders if he does, in fact, have a decent chance of protecting himself, even in the dark, in the _kali vastu's_ territory. He remembers the high, mournful wailing of the mother when they brought her daughter's finger back to the village, wrapped in clean white cloth. _And yet the cry of blood for blood, and the burning desire to rid a countryside of a menace than which there is none more terrible, is irresistible...._

He remembers plunging into the jungle after the _kali vastu_, no thought in his mind except the fleeing prey. And that, he knows, was hardly a thought at all.

The moon has not yet risen.

Remus settles to the ground with his back against a tree, machete in one hand and wand in the other. He does not know whether he is setting the trap or falling into it. But he waits, and he feels the blood racing in his veins, the tremor of his right hand as he grips the wand.

His legs have grown stiff when he first hears the crack of a twig.

Remus whips his head to the right and sees the shape almost immediately. About thirty feet distant, half-hidden behind the base of a tree, is the _kali vastu_, crouched so low and motionless it seems more like a black stone than an animal, indistinct and shapeless except for its eyes. The great golden eyes blink once, slowly. For several minutes, Remus and the creature stare at one another.

Then it begins to flow.

Remus tenses immediately, but the _kali vastu_ is not moving toward him. It shifts to the side, long, graceful appendages moving away from the main body, eyes never leaving Remus. It crawls to its own right, beginning to circle him anticlockwise, its motions deliberate and almost completely silent. The creature never fully detaches from the shadows, blending effortlessly from one dark patch to the next. On the night air Remus catches the creature's distinctive scent, a strong, pungent odour of moist earth and freshly spilled blood, so sharp it is almost a taste more than a smell; Remus licks his dry lips and opens his mouth to inhale more deeply. The golden eyes disappear behind a tree, but soon emerge on the other side, still fixed on his. The creature slides along the ground so slowly that, at times, it seems not to be moving at all, but its progress is steady.

As it nears the position almost directly before him, Remus notices a subtle change in the gloom of the forest. The moon has risen. His heart begins to beat faster, and the _kali vastu_ stops, blinking its golden eyes once. The jungle is suddenly filled with a long, low keening noise, completely unlike the piercing shriek he has been expecting. The insects fall silent and the moonlight seems to tremble. Remus shivers despite the heat.

The creature continues its circle, slower yet, still calling. The tone changes when it takes in a breath, and Remus listens for that slight hitch, focusing on that minute modulation as proof that the _kali vastu_ is a living, breathing creature, a creature that can tire, be confused, scared or injured. The heartwood may play by its own rules, but the _kali vastu_ still breathes, and as such it is vulnerable.

Never once glancing away from the golden eyes, Remus reviews curses and hexes in his mind. _Stupefy_ did nothing and he worries that its magical cousin _Impedimenta_ will be equally ineffective. _Incarcerous _is not an option with those claws. _Sanguinis_ gave the creature pause though apparently did no permanent damage. _Asperix_ comes to mind, if only as a way of silencing that maddening moan. _Cavitatas_ is a good way to stop a leaping enemy, but Remus isn't sure the dense jungle provides enough room for the air currents to gather properly; _Reducto_ might be a better choice.

Tightening his slippery grip on the machete, Remus remembers the creature's blood and claws shining in sharp contrast to the formless mass of its body.

The creature is at ten o'clock.

It falls silent for a moment but resumes the cry almost immediately. The few brave crickets who dared chirp are hushed once again.

The creature is directly to his left. Remus fights the urge to turn his body to face it, ignoring the strain in his neck and dryness in his eyes. He will not move; he will not do anything that the creature could interpret as hostile. It passes behind another tree, fading almost completely into the shadows. Remus watches the patch of moonlight on the opposite side of the tree; when the creature emerges, for the briefest moment, the tenebrous form seems to writhe in a confusion before coalescing into a feline crouch once again.

Remus is running out of curses. The creature seems to have every advantage, being both magical and physical, and he feels woefully unprepared to deal with a shape-shifting foe who uses teeth and claws as well as shadows.

Eight o'clock.

Remus tries to plan what he will do when the creature is behind him. The moon is quite high now, invisible through the canopy. Its light seems subdued for two days past full but Remus doesn't dare glance upward.

The _kali vastu_ is now almost directly behind him, and Remus twists around to keep it in sight. It sinks to the ground, barely distinguishable from the earth, and streams in one fluid motion into the cover of a thick patch of undergrowth about fifteen feet away.

The creature is silent.

Holding his breath in momentary indecision, Remus strains to catch any sound--an intake of breath, a rustle of leaves, anything. But the jungle is eerily quiet. He lowers his left hand, the one holding the machete, to the ground and shifts his weight to push himself into a crouch, never taking his eyes from where he believes the _kali vastu_ to be. He begins to stand, his legs protesting after being motionless for so long. When he is fully upright, Remus watches the shadows and listens. Gradually, the jungle insects resume their noisy night-time activities. Remus resists the urge to _shush_ them. There is no motion in the darkness ahead of him.

Then a snap to his left--he turns quickly but sees nothing. It could have been a twig breaking or a beetle landing. Remus becomes aware of the pain in his chest from holding his breath. He forces himself to exhale, swallowing to relieve the dry tightness in his throat.

He sees the eyes and hears the scream in the same moment.

The _kali vastu_ is ahead of him and to the left, about fifteen feet away, staring unblinking from the cover of a dense thicket of small trees. It screams again, and Remus' blood races. He instinctively raises the machete, and the creature darts sideways, weaving through the branches and coming to a stop in a clear spot between the trees. With the third scream, Remus can see the creature's mouth, the long teeth curving upward from the bottom jaw, the black tongue between them.

Remus forgets his earlier decision to defend himself only. He points his wand and shouts, "_Asperix!_"

The scream breaks off with a strangled choke and the creature recoils. But it recovers almost instantly, screaming again and rolling forward, a blur of black motion. Remus steps back and aims. "_Deflectere!_" The wave of opaque silver light pulses outward but the _kali vastu_ leaps through it, unaffected. It poises to spring. "_Sanguinis!_" The curse hits the creature between its forelegs--in the splash of red light its limbs are thin, elongate, dragging the shadows in tendrils--and it screams in pain.

Again, it recovers immediately and storms forward. "_Sanguinis!_" Remus feels the claws catch his upper arm and a spray of blood across his face as the creature's head snaps back. It reels around, shivering and shuddering as if trying to shake the curse from its head, then lowers itself to the ground about ten feet from Remus and makes a low, growling noise as it slithers away. Remus can hear the blood in its throat, the gurgling that gives way to a high-pitched huffing noise as it retreats and folds into itself, shrinking into a tight, dark, amorphous mass, golden eyes blinking rapidly.

Remus casts, "_Asperix!_" again, but the creature vanishes into a thicket, making no attempt at silence. The moonlight whirls in its wake, a confusion of light and dark that obscures the broken branches for a moment before snapping into clarity.

Remus runs after it, disregarding the tearing pain in his shoulder, but the loping _kali vastu_ is much faster than he. Following its cries and the sound of it crashing carelessly through the jungle, he stumbles into a swirling perturbation of shadow and gasps as his skin is set afire with magical energy. Remus plunges through the pulse without pause but soon loses sight of his quarry. He does not stop tracking it, though, following the scant trail of blood even as the strangled cries grow further and further away.

Rounding a tree, Remus brushes his left shoulder against the bark and hisses with pain. For the first time, he pauses to look at the injury. The sleeve of his shirt is almost torn off, and there are three deep slices, edged with black as if the skin were burnt, where the _kali vastu's_ claws caught his bicep. Blood flows freely from the wound. He tears the sleeve away and dabs at the cuts with the cloth, then points his wand and says, "_Santiorus_." A cool breeze washes over his arm, but the wound is not cleaned. Remus tries again, "_Sanitorus_," and still there is no effect. He knows better than to try magically closing the wound before cleaning it, so he simply wraps the sleeve around the gashes as best he can, catching one end of the cloth in his teeth to pull it tight.

As Remus resumes the trail, he notices that the sky has lightened considerably and feels a mixture of guilt and relief. The _kali vastu_ screams in the distance. It likely won't bleed to death from its wounds--if it can bleed to death at all--for already the blood trail is almost impossible to follow, and he spends several minutes trying to locate the next damp patch. He stops, feeling like an exceptionally worthless hunter for injuring his prey badly and then promptly losing it, but his chances of finding the _kali vastu_ in the daylight are slim; it is no coincidence that it appeared the moment darkness fell. Also, his inability to heal his own injury, which is beginning to throb quite painfully, means that he has to get out of the heartwood or risk leaving his own bloody trail.

The _kali vastu_ screams once more, to the north, even further away.

In the south, there is an answering shout. Remus turns at once and begins walking. He hears another shout and quickens his pace, running until he sees a break in the trees ahead and a field beyond. He emerges from the heartwood almost exactly where he entered and stops abruptly, catching his breath.

Four villagers are gathered by the old man's house. One of them sees Remus and calls out, and immediately they run over to him, talking excitedly in Hindi. He catches only a few words and shakes his head to show them he can't follow. Crowding around him, they touch his arm and lead him to the house. The old man and his wife appear in the doorway, and the woman quickly ducks inside, returning a moment later with a porcelain jug of water. One of the men begins shouting down the valley; the others motion for Remus to sit on the stool the old man brings from inside. Remus does so gratefully, suddenly exhausted. He lets the old woman wash his arm and realises he is still holding both machete and wand. He puts the wand in his back pocket and sets the machete on the ground. The bag is still slung over his shoulder, the cotton strap across his chest now stained with blood. He is relieved to see that the map is still there--crushed, but still there.

Men are approaching from down the valley, dim silhouettes in the pre-dawn. One of them is Rakesh, who reaches Remus quickly and looks down at him, eyes widening at the sight of his bleeding arm. He pauses, as if uncertain what to say, then declares, "We have been looking many days, Mr. Lupin."

"I was track--what?" Remus stops abruptly. "Many days?"

"Seven," Rakesh confirms.

"But I--" Remus closes his mouth, unsure of how to respond. He is quiet for a long moment, then says, "Seven days?"

"_Sat,_" another man agrees, nodding vigorously. "_Ji ha, sat._"

"Yes. We have been looking during the day." Nodding at Remus' arm, Rakesh adds, "We were certain the _kali vastu_ had taken you." One of the men says something in Hindi, and Rakesh translates, "They thought it would attack this morning. They heard it scream."

"Oh, um...it's injured." _Seven days_, Remus thinks. It was a long night, but not that long. He has lost hours to the heartwood before, wandering the borders, but he didn't know it could steal entire days. Remus stands up, ignoring the old woman's protest. He wants nothing more than to return to his bungalow and heal his arm--or walk farther from the heartwood to heal it, if necessary--and go to sleep.

"You hurt it? Will it live?" The hope in Rakesh's voice is unmistakable.

"I don't know," Remus says. "I followed it, but it was still moving too fast."

"Mr. Chandrasekhar's driver came for you."

Remus looks at Rakesh, surprised. "Why?"

"To take you to Haridwar." Remus had forgotten the arrangement, and he nods slowly. Rakesh adds, "He has probably told Mr. Chandrasekhar that you are dead."

"Well." Remus runs a hand through his hair, realising too late that his fingers are sticky with blood. "We shall have to let him know that is not the case."

The two miles to the village are long. Remus stumbles into his bungalow just as the sun rises over the mountains.


	5. Chapter 5

Remus heals his arm reasonably well, but he suspects it will scar. The closed gashes have an odd feel to them, a warm tingling slightly reminiscent of the werewolf scar, though that sensation has faded considerably over the years. He keeps his upper arm wrapped in bandages to avoid arousing suspicion and is touched by the care Rakesh's mother takes to collect and boil the cleanest strips of cloth in the village for his use. Whatever doubts the villagers had about his prowess as a hunter were dispelled by his seven days tracking the _kali vastu_ through the jungle. Every person in the village demands to hear the story of his fight with the _kali vastu_ at least twice. Remus is embarrassed by the attention, but he soon gives in to their demands. Frequent, graphic retellings of the same story are not only allowed, they are expected, and for three days the village speaks of little else.

Word is sent to Nainital that Mr. Lupin is alive and well, and on the fourth morning Salil arrives bearing a letter from Chandrasekhar. He writes that he is most pleased to learn that Remus is not lost in the heartwood, and that his friend Mastyamohandra has returned from Dharamsala and is awaiting Remus' arrival in Haridwar. Salil shakes Remus' hand and listens eagerly as the villagers begin to tell him Remus' story. Remus slips away from the group and goes to gather his things from the bungalow. As he is returning to Salil's car in the middle of the village, a tiny woman in a yellow shawl comes up to him and says something quietly in Hindi. He recognises her as the mother of the young woman the _kali vastu_ killed, though he cannot understand what she says. She touches her hand to his cheek, then to his chest, and Remus can only stand there, mute and uncomfortable, until Rakesh notices and walks over.

"She wishes you luck on your pilgrimage," he explains, and the woman says one more thing before walking away, smiling despite the tears in her eyes.

"Pilgrimage?"

Rakesh shrugs. "I tell them you are going to speak to a wise man in Haridwar; they believe you are going to pray in the sacred city. She says," he nods at the departing woman, "that you will pray and return to stop the demon that killed her daughter."

Remus rubs a hand over the back of his neck and sighs. "I hope so," he says. He weaves his way through the crowd of villagers, accepting well-wishes and feeling unworthy of the attention. As the car splashes through the mud on the way out of the village, Remus feels a surprising pang of regret to be leaving, if only for a few days. When he glances back, the villagers are still gathered in a tight group, the men in brown trousers and women in their modest _salwar kameez_. Remus smiles to himself.

Salil tells Remus that it will take most of the day to drive to Haridwar, so Remus attempts to relax and enjoy the scenery as they descend from the foothills. He still holds his breath each time they accelerate around the lumbering, overloaded and top-heavy lorries, intricately decorated in brilliant shades of red, orange, blue and yellow, with helpful reminders in both English and Hindi on the tailgates: _Use dipper at night! Tat-tat!_ He watches the vegetation thicken and change as they descend in elevation, and notes with amusement the abundance of wild cannabis choking the roadside.

Before noon, Salil pulls the car to a stop on an unremarkable roadside and turns to Remus. "Mr. Chandrasekhar says you will like this."

Confused, Remus raises his eyebrows. "Like what?"

Pushing the driver's side door open, Salil grins. "Come."

Remus climbs out of the car and follows Salil to a gate with a sign painted on it. _Colonel James Corbett Residence._ Salil opens the gate and steps aside to allow Remus entry. A man comes over to them, smiling and nodding at Remus, and begins talking to Salil. Remus wanders along a path that crosses the neatly trimmed garden and toward a modest white house with a green roof. In a small gravel square set into the lawn there is a red pedestal with a rough, rather ugly cement bust of Corbett; Remus examines it for a few moments before turning away, disappointed that he learns nothing of the man from the statue. He walks to the house, and the caretaker hurries over to open the door and show him inside.

The rooms are barren of furniture, but photographs and signs dot the walls, listing the impressive details of Corbett's career. There is a picture of the hunter standing alongside the dead Bachelor of Powalgargh, ten feet seven inches from nose to tip of tail, and another of the dog Robin, who used to perch silently with his back paws in his master's jacket pocket so the man could carry his rifle and comfort his dog at the same time. Remus smiles sadly at the photograph of the little spaniel mutt. Salil and the caretaker speak quietly in the other room while Remus reads the signs, tallies up the man-eater casualties, examines Corbett's hat, guns and writing desk. His footsteps echo in the hot, airless rooms.

After he has seen everything in the tiny museum, Remus steps back onto the veranda and studies the hand-painted map of "Man Eaters of Kumaon (Shot by Corbett)". The village of Pakhari is not marked on the map, but he finds where it would be and notes that it was well within the range of some of the more notorious man-eaters. He contemplates, not for the first time, how the _kali vastu_ would react to a tiger invading its territory, if a mere tiger even could; he wonders how long the _kali vastu_ has been living in the heartwood, and whether that time can be measured in ordinary months and years.

Salil joins him on the veranda and Remus nods that he is ready to leave. As they are walking back across the garden, Remus spots a white sign on the edge of the lawn, written in both Hindi and English: _All creatures have equal right to live on the earth. Mahatma Gandhi. _

"Good in theory," Remus says quietly.

"Yes?" Salil is behind him, waiting expectantly. "We go?"

"Yes. We go."

* * *

They arrive in Haridwar by late afternoon, as the sun is slanting fiercely across the low foothills surrounding the River Ganges. Remus has won a friend for life in Salil by casting a Cooling Charm on the interior of the car, allowing them to travel comfortably isolated from the lorries, carts and bicycles struggling along in the heat. As they near the city, the roads grow crowded and Salil's driving becomes ever more daring. Remus gazes out the window, watching the jungle and fields give way to muddy tracks lined with squalid, close-set bungalows, crumbling concrete buildings and crooked shanties. Barefoot women balance huge sheaves of grass and baskets of laundry on their heads; old men stoop to push empty carts away from the city. When concrete buildings outnumber wooden shacks, Salil turns off the main road onto a narrower street, leaning heavily on the horn to urge a small boy and his emaciated buffalo out of the way. Remus loses track of the turns and detours as Salil winds into the city. Haridwar is not a large city by Indian standards, but Remus is soon lost and thankful that Salil seems to know where they're going.

The car stops--in the middle of the road, as there's no place to pull aside--and Salil says, "We are here." Remus pushes his door open and steps out; the sounds and smells and heat of the city assault him immediately. The narrow street is crowded with people on foot and bicycle, gathered around carts and flimsy wooden shop stands, arguing over the price of mangos, bananas and litchi, chasing away stray dogs with harsh shouts. The sweet smell of ripe fruit mingles with the sharper odours of petrol, livestock, incense, waste and a hot, tantalising meal being cooked nearby. The car attracts some attention, and the men smoking outside a _restra_ across the street stare openly. Remus feels conspicuously white and foreign as Salil opens the boot for him to retrieve his case.

They have stopped in front of a wide metal gate, painted orange at one time, with a modest sign affixed to it with pieces of wire. The lettering is Hindi and a similar script Remus doesn't recognise; one English word is squeezed at the bottom in tiny handwriting, obviously added as an afterthought: _ashram_. Salil pulls the gate open and motions Remus inside. The gate protects a narrow brick alley, free of trash and mud, that leads to a large courtyard shaded by four large, leafy trees. A group of boys in matching blue school uniforms are playing at the base of one tree; they fall silent when Remus and Salil enter the courtyard then resume speaking quietly among themselves, pointing at Remus with curious grins. Salil speaks to the boys, motioning at the tall, once-white building at the back of the courtyard. Remus is relieved when the boys nod, "_Ji ha, ji ha_," and point to the open doors leading into the building.

The room they enter is low-ceilinged, dim and dingy in a way that reminds Remus of the Ministry offices in Delhi. Beige paint is peeling from the walls, the dark blue floor tiles are cracked, and mounted crookedly on the walls are two lonely bronze sconces. Salil wanders from the room into a narrow corridor and begins speaking to someone; Remus waits awkwardly, setting his case on the floor. He hears a laugh behind him and sees two little boys ducking from the doorway, giggling.

Salil returns, followed by a woman barely five feet tall. Although her clothing is Indian, her features are Chinese. Extending her hand to Remus, she says, "You are Mr. Lupin. Welcome to Lam Sangbo. I am Wangdu Li. You may call me Li." Her voice and handshake are both surprisingly strong for so small a person.

"Remus Lupin," he says, "Pleased to meet you."

"Ah, you say that now." She grins and jerks her head toward the corridor behind her. "Come, I will show you the room." To Salil, she says something in rapid Hindi, waving impatiently toward the courtyard. He leaves, and to Remus she explains, "The man who has the _restra_ will protest if the car is in the street too long. He is probably standing at the gate now, waiting to complain." The corridor ends in a narrow staircase, gloomy and dim; Li lifts the folds of her _sari_ and dashes up the steps quickly, glancing over her shoulder on the first floor landing and saying, "The best room is on the second floor, _adhyapak_ insists you have it."

"I'm terribly sorry," Remus says, when they emerge from the stairwell into the wide corridor on the second floor. "But I don't quite know where I am."

Li looks back at him again, an eyebrow raised. "Yes, many people come to Haridwar because they do not know where they are, or why. Though you English usually go to Rishikesh to find your guru and learn to be a rock 'n roll star. Because sitting still like this," she puts the palms of her hands together in front of her chest, "for so long will show you why your music makes young women tear at your clothes and cry."

Remus grins and shakes his head. "I'm afraid I abandoned my dreams of being John Lennon years ago. Haven't the spectacles, you see."

"And you are alive, while he is not." Li stops in front of a closed door, and looks up at Remus, a good foot taller than she. "This is Lam Sangbo. We are an ashram or a school or a debating society, depending on the day of the week and whether we're drinking tea or whisky. Do you prefer tea or whisky?" She pushes the door open and steps into the room; it is large and bright, with double doors opening onto a rooftop.

"It depends," he answers, "on whether I'm in a school or a debating society." Remus sets his case down and goes over the doors; the view of the River Ganges is unobstructed. "What does Lam Sangbo mean? Is it Hindi?"

"Tibetan," Li says. She opens a small cupboard by the door and retrieves linens and a thin, sad pillow. "It means 'compassionate path'." Frowning, she adds, "But Matsyamohandra still calls it _skul_; he has no imagination. He will be back tonight, or tomorrow, maybe. He has gone to Neelkantha. We heard last week from Chandrasekhar that you were likely dead." With a shrug, Li steps over to the door and tilts her head to the side. "There is a washroom at the end of the hall. Come down for tea when you are ready."

Li shuts the door behind her. Remus steps back out onto the roof and squints in the brilliant afternoon light. Haridwar is a maze of narrow streets and alleys, colourful buildings stacked along the riverside, covered in advertisements and signs, softened by the ubiquitous lines of laundry drying in the sun. The sounds of automobile horns and sporadic shouts drift up on a light breeze. Nearest the city, the river flows in a canal, both sides crowded with people wading and bathing. The worry Remus felt while they driving into the city begins to fade. It is quite a pretty scene, the red and white domes of temples on the riverside, the long bridge teeming with travellers, the natural course of the Ganges glistening in the distance.

Inside, Remus takes the small towel from his case and goes to find the washroom. It is impeccably clean and in perfect repair. Hot water spurts from the tap with no delay. He washes his face and hands, then returns to his room and hangs the towel over a chair to dry. In the evening glow, he looks around the room; on closer inspection, the sparse furniture is quite fine, a desk and chair of heavy dark woods, and the mattress on the bed is actually quite comfortable. The breeze helps alleviate the heat, so Remus pauses only a moment before placing his case in the cupboard and casting a simple Safe Charm on it. He leaves the doors wide open when he goes down to find Li.

* * *

Matsyamohandra does not return to Haridwar for five days. Each day Li says, "Tonight, or maybe tomorrow," and is completely unconcerned when he fails to materialise. Remus is impatient, anxious to meet the man and leave the hectic city, but he finds ways to fill his time. Li introduces him to the extensive library at Lam Sangbo, housed in a beautiful, ornate room just down the corridor on the second floor. Every room that he sees in the ashram is spotlessly clean and decorated in classic style, with the exception of the grim entry and bland hallways. Li explains that they keep the foyer deceptively shabby to discourage Muggle tourists who wander in looking for a religious experience or yoga classes. When Remus asks why they don't simply lock the gate or cast a privacy charm, Li smiles mysteriously and tells him that lunch will be at one o'clock.

Remus spends his mornings browsing Montmorency Maxwell's Indian journals in the warm, sunlit library, blowing dust from the pages that have been magically rescued from dry rot but remain quite delicate. He likes the smell of the Lam Sangbo library, rich in leather, wood and parchment, like the Hogwarts Library, while maintaining a subtle tang of incense and spice just noticeable enough that, however lost he might become in his reading, Remus is never surprised to glance up and see the Ganges shimmering in the distance. Through the window, the noise of the city is muffled to a gentle hum, which Remus prefers to absolute silence. The wing-backed chairs are surprisingly comfortable, upholstered in some brilliant patchwork pattern. "Gujarati," Li explains, when he asks about the patchwork, and laughs when Remus immediately glances at the map on the wall to locate Gujarat. Nobody scolds Remus for sipping tea while he reads, and he is interrupted only when Li or Vijay Gaur, a young man who also teaches at the school, come in to retrieve a book or chat.

It is, in fact, a nearly perfect library experience, tantalisingly close to that desirable abstract of library nirvana, an existence manifest when a lowly man ascends to the status of Perpetual Reader At One With The Written Word, adrift in sea of impeccable grammar and coherent theses, breathtaking illuminations and painstaking calligraphy, where every book is in its proper place and the Enlightened One need only think, "I wonder--" before volumes appear before him on silken pillows and thick old pages rustle invitingly.

During his first morning in the library, Remus decides that the only thing separating him from a truly transcendental literary experience is the reading material itself. He scowls at the jolly jade Buddha smiling on the window sill and draws another of Maxwell's journals from the pile. The journals occupy twelve thick, hand-bound leather books, every page filled with tiny, nearly illegible writing and cryptic diagrams. Maxwell was widely acknowledged as one of the great minds of transfiguration research, but after one hundred years of ground-breaking studies he retreated to a private home in Calcutta and continued his work in seclusion until his death in 1869. He never produced another publication to rival the influence of _A Brief Guide to the Animagus Transfiguration_, and Remus remembers Professor McGonagall making some offhand comment in fourth year that many believed Maxwell had gone mad in his later years. At the time, Remus hadn't understood the effect that comment had on his friends: agitation, whispering and hurriedly scribbled notes.

Now, years later, Remus is beginning to think that McGonagall's words had a strong basis in fact. Maxwell's journals are, for the most part, painfully unintelligible. The man seldom spent more than half a page discussing a single subject; he proposed an experiment on one page and discussed its possibilities twenty later, then, after thirty pages of unrelated discourse, recorded the results in a hastily scribbled chart between proud ramblings about a distant Muggle relation who had to settle for Second Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos and discussions about the influence of Ladakhi ley lines on the migration patterns of native Indian songbirds. Remus skims the journals dubiously, well aware that in doing this he could easily overlook any mention of the Himalayan heartwoods, and is relieved when one o'clock arrives and it is time for lunch.

* * *

There are twenty-one boys at the Lam Sangbo school, ranging in age from six to fourteen. Many of them, like their teacher Vijay, come from small Himalayan hill towns with long, respected magical heritages but nonexistent magical education. Matsyamohandra finds the boys and brings them to Haridwar, where they gather in the courtyard and classrooms to learn history and astronomy and practice simple charms with crude, homemade wands. They are a friendly, informal group, taking great interest in their English visitor, cornering Remus with endless questions about wizards and magic elsewhere in the world. His first afternoon in Haridwar, Remus looks over the tops of the boys' heads, sees the cunning glint in Li's eyes and smiles wryly as she suggests that he might like to teach the boys a few things in the afternoons. She even offers a justification for her request, though they both know it is unnecessary. Li herself hails from Tibet, of mixed Han and Tibetan heritage, so, she claims, her talents are focused around combating extreme weather and reciting the many unsuspected magical properties of yaks. Vijay, on the other hand, is from a village near Almora, so his skills lie in cutting grass and herding buffalo.

"Even Matsyamohandra," Li says, "knows much about ancient writings and will talk for days and days about a theory nobody has heard of, but ask him to fix a broken pipe, he reaches for the spanner, not the wand."

Still smiling, Remus sighs. "I don't know much about magical plumbing, but I'd be happy spend a few hours with the boys. What do you have in mind?"

Li waves her hand dismissively. "Oh, anything."

Remus has never taught before, but his childhood is not so far in the past that he has forgotten the best way to gain and keep a small boy's attention. An hour later Li returns to the courtyard, drawn by the shrieks of laughter accompanying one boy's gleeful Jelly-Legs dance. Upon seeing her disapproving frown, Remus pronounces, "_Finite incantatem_." As the boy collapses, giggling, into the group at the base of one of the trees, Remus asks, "Now, do you know why I can make Ram dance, but it doesn't work when Mehmud tries it?"

The boys begin to speak all at once.

"You're a powerful wizard."

"You have a real wand."

"We must practice more."

"It is an English jinx."

"The English invented jinxes."

Remus laughs at this and is about to speak when another boy adds, "We don't know how to move things."

"Ah," Remus nods, turning to the boy named Bhaskar. "What do you mean?"

"You are moving his legs, but we don't know how to do that. Once I moved a chicken by accident," Bhaskar says thoughtfully. "But I couldn't do it again, even with my wand. And Li can make the teacups move across the table, and Vijay can close the gate from right here. You know how to make things move."

Glancing at Li, Remus sees that her frown has faded. "Yes," he agrees. "Exactly. Now, legs are complicated things, so it's much better to practise on something smaller." He reaches around and grabs a stone from the soil at the base of the tree, placing it before him on the cement.

The boys lean forward eagerly. "Will you make the stone dance?"

"No," Remus says, "You are going to make the stone fly."

* * *

By the teatime on the second day, most of the boys have mastered _Wingardium leviosa_, and Remus is convinced that if Professor Flitwick--rather than dully floating feathers about--provided his pupils with cockroaches and the instruction, "Make it fly into your neighbour's hair," the charmwork of Hogwarts' first years would progress with unprecedented speed. The boys leave after tea; most of them live with friends of Matsyamohandra's or relatives in the city. They go through the gate in a noisy, cheerful cluster of blue uniforms, waving excitedly at Remus and making him promise to show them another spell tomorrow.

Remus joins Li and Vijay in the kitchen for tea.

"So now they can make things fly," Li says, pouring a cup for Remus. Her expression is unreadable.

Remus sits down and takes the teacup. "Yes. Not a particularly useful skill on its own," he admits, wondering what she is leading up to. If, he adds silently, she is leading up to anything at all; he is not yet familiar enough with her manner to know for sure. He continues, "But it provides a foundation for more complex charms."

Li says nothing, sipping her tea and never taking her eyes off Remus.

Vijay glances from one to the other, then turns to Remus and asks brightly, "How is your research? Have you found anything?" Vijay is a tall, lanky, cheerful young man, with a soft manner that nicely offsets Li's brusqueness. He willingly admits that Haridwar is the furthest he's ever travelled from his home near Almora and expresses no desire to see more of the world, although he asks Remus serious and intelligent questions about Britain and other places.

Vijay is particularly interested in Remus' search for the _kali vastu_. Rumours about the creature have spread through the Himalayan hill towns, and he's received worried letters from his father.

Remus tells them honestly, "I've found nothing yet, nothing specific. Maxwell's journals are quite difficult to read."

"Matsyamohandra will know," Vijay says simply.

"He will return tomorrow, or the next day," Li adds. Then, "Would you like to go to the _ghats_ tonight?"

Curious, Remus asks, "What happens at the _ghats_?"

"Every evening at sunset the priests perform Ganga Aarti, the river worship ceremony. Perhaps you have seen it from the library?"

"The fires on the river."

Li nods. "Yes, that is it. Would you like to see it tonight?"

The past two evenings, Remus has watched from the library window, wondering at the beautiful and haunting glow of flaming offerings set adrift on the river, but he feels strangely nervous at the idea of viewing the ceremony up close. Nodding slowly, he says, "Yes, I would like that."

They walk down to the river as the sun is setting. Remus had ventured out of the ashram early that morning, walking down to the river before the city awoke. Before the day began the river was a peaceful place, belonging to the women pounding their laundry on the stone steps, and old _sadhus_ in their orange robes, wading and praying in the soft early light, grasping heavy chains to keep from being swept away by the current. Now, however, the riverside is packed with people, devotees and tourists, vendors and guards, jostling for a position closer to the sacred _ghat_ at Hari-ki-Pairi, the hollow where Vishnu once trod, his footprints marking the point at which the Ganges emerges from the Himalaya. Li strides through the crowd without hesitation, her forceful glare making up for the disadvantage of her small stature; Remus and Vijay follow, subjected to considerably more bumping and shoving.

They find a place on an artificial promontory facing the _ghats_ on which the priests are deftly handling torches before the crowd of onlookers. The riverfront is alight with the same ceremony at all of the temples, large and small, and Remus watches in silent fascination. When the priests have finished, the crowds surge forward with tiny lanterns and flowers, and the water dances with red and golden light. The night is filled with smoke, songs and prayers, thousands of voices ringing through the haze as they set their offerings afloat. The lanterns and petals drift slowly from the steps, drawing the glow away from the city in tight clumps that gently disperse, bobbing on the current like shy little stars, occasionally winking out and leaving a cool, dark void.

The three wizards stand shoulder to shoulder, watching until Li announces that it is time to go. As they walk slowly up the hill toward the ashram, Remus asks, "The ceremony, what does it mean?"

Li frowns. "The Muggles worship the river. They believe the water will wash away their sins, and the offerings are thanks to the gods. For wizards it is different." She says nothing more, hurrying through the crowds with her head high and eyes forward.

Remus turns to Vijay. "Different how?"

The young man gives a one-shouldered shrug. "It is not so different. In India, wizards do not concern themselves with sin, but they bathe in the river and scatter the ashes of their dead here. There are some who believe that setting a flame on Ganga is the same as giving your soul to the magic that flows with the river."

"Why does it upset Li?"

For a long moment, Remus thinks that Vijay isn't going to answer. Finally, he speaks again, "Ganga is an Indian river, born in the Indian mountains."

"I don't understand."

"She cannot go home, you see," Vijay explains, tilting his head thoughtfully to one side. "Li is Tibetan, not Indian. It is the same for many Tibetan wizards, as it is for the Muggles. They cannot go home but it is difficult for them to stay here. Her mother was a Tibetan Muggle, but her father is an important man in the Chinese magical government. She cannot remain his daughter while being Tibetan in Tibet."

Remus says nothing, feeling awkwardly uninformed and struggling to remember what little he knows of Chinese politics.

When they return to the ashram, Remus takes a pot of tea into the library and spends several minutes studying the exquisite map of the world on the wall. It is a magical map, highlighting those cities and regions important to wizards but not necessarily to Muggles; Lhasa is a large red dot while Beijing is barely a speck. The distance across the Himalaya seems minor compared to the span of the Asian continent. Remus turns west and lets his gaze travel over Arabia and into Europe. Britain is ridiculously small, tucked away in the north. The Scottish isles are no more than a dusting of green spilled into the North Sea. He thinks of the maps decorating the walls of the History of Magic classroom, with the regions and wizarding cities of England presented in excruciating detail, surrounded by an ocean so stubbornly blue it is as if nothing could impinge its insular isolation, with vague border scribbles hinting that places such as Ireland and France might exist just beyond the edge of the known world. Remus can see that the muted green hedgerows and stone walls of England would be lost in the seething, churning mass that is India, awash with its patchwork of rich oranges and reds, slightly obscured by a fragrant blue smoke and somehow managing to convey a sense of cartographic confusion despite the neatness of the drawing.

Sipping his tea thoughtfully, he is curiously free of homesickness.

_Is that really surprising?_

Remus turns the question over in his mind.

Stepping away from the map, he sets another of Maxwell's journals on the table and begins to read.

* * *

On the morning of the fifth day, Remus stumbles across a passage that catches his eye. Maxwell has just finished discussing a dubious experiment that, as far as Remus can tell, consists entirely of trapping an unsuspecting kneazle in various magical containers and subjecting the poor creature to a wide range of transfiguration curses. Concluding the experimental report with a casual comment about the protest voiced by Sridevi, his housekeeper and owner of the unlucky kneazle, Maxwell then launches into a wordy ramble about the residual damping effects of transformative properties in magically prefigured inheritance in such-and-such conditions in someplace-or-other locations, and Remus skims, bored, before blinking at a single word: _lycanthropy._

He goes back to the beginning of the paragraph and reads more carefully.

_It is apparent upon lengthy study of the transformative properties of entities magically prefigured for feral transfiguration by involuntary inheritance or accursed re-enunciation that limitations to practical capacity evolve concurrently with thaumaturgical development in conditions which require or initiate base familiarity of procedural, theoretical or arithmancical transformative sorceries, the most observable examples being the extreme exertion required for bearers of lycanthropy to achieve proficiency in transfigurative arts._

Remus bristles a bit after he is able to wrap his mind around the sentence. He would never claim to have a great talent for transfiguration, but neither would he say his acceptable marks required "extreme exertion". Anyone would feel like a bit of a transfiguration dunce next to three fifteen-year-old Animagi.

_The converse question regarding enhancement of antitransformative ability in saturated transformative environments remains unanswered as appropriately warded locales are rare and lycanthropic experimental subjects are difficult to restrain and monitor._

"Probably because you'd stick them in a box and curse them," Remus mutters, feeling a surge of empathy toward Sridevi's kneazle.

Maxwell says no more about werewolves, moving to discuss, instead, the many-faceted representations of Hindu deities and the philosophical complications presented by a religion in which the gods may outnumber the worshippers.

Several hours later, watching the boys practice the Freezing Charm on scurrying cockroaches, Remus wonders what Maxwell meant by "transformative environments". In Maxwell's nineteenth century terminology, the phrase likely referred to the old belief that magic could be divided into four groups: Transformation, Stasis, Creation and Destruction. The names of the categories are as far as Remus' knowledge of archaic magical theory extends, but he lets himself speculate and decides that "transformative environment" is a fair description of the heartwood. He adds this to his mental list of things to ask Matsyamohandra, then notices that some of the older boys have mastered the Freezing Charm, combined it with the Levitation Charm, and are gleefully bombarding the younger students with arthropod missiles.

After the cockroaches have been liberated and the boys are gone for the day, Remus returns to the journals but finds no further mention of either werewolves or transformative environments.

* * *

Late at night, the city relaxes into a warm lazy hush, and the air is sharply scented with smoke. Remus stands at the library's open window, watching the lanterns on the river blink out and drift away. The candlelight from the sconces flickers gently, and he turns around.

A man stands on the other side of the table. He is thin and frail, dressed in too-large shirt and trousers that give him the look of a child in his father's clothes. But beneath wispy grey hair and startling blue eyes, his mischievous smile bears an uncanny resemblance to the jade Buddha on the window sill. He is perfectly still, poised with one hand slightly raised, as if frozen in the act of reaching toward the books on the table.

For a long moment, neither man speaks or moves.

"Good evening," Remus says.

The mysterious Buddha smile breaks into a wide grin. "'The evening air is eager with the sad music of water.'"

"Sad music of water?" Remus repeats before he can stop himself.

"So wrote the great Indian poet Tagore, a Muggle who understood the magic of language far better than most wizards." The man continues to smile, apparently waiting for Remus to respond.

Remus steps away from the window and extends his hand. "I'm Remus Lupin. Are you Matsyamohandra?"

"Remus Lupin." The man exhales the words thoughtfully, taking Remus' hand and holding it. "Did your parents consult the stars before deciding on so fatefully prescient a name?"

"No," Remus shakes his head, smiling, "but they certainly consulted the stars afterward."

Matsyamohandra releases Remus' hand and motions toward a chair and says, "Li tells me you have been reading Maxwell's journals."

_Right down to business then_. Remus sits and says, "I have, but I'm afraid I can't make any sense of them. Chandrasekhar told me that you've studied the heartwoods?"

"Ah, yes. Chandrasekhar summoned you to India."

"He summoned a professor of mine, actually," Remus corrects.

"An Englishman to find an Indian monster."

Something in Matsyamohandra's tone puts Remus on guard, though he doesn't know why. Matsyamohandra is placid and attentive on the other side of the table, his posture straight and his expression curious and open. Remus frowns, feeling as though he ought to defend Chandrasekhar, who has been so kind so him, but instead he observes, "I doubt the _kali vastu_ thinks of itself as a monster." The moment the words are spoken, Remus wonders why he said them.

"Tell me what you have learned of the creature and the heartwood."

Remus tells Matsyamohandra about his map of the heartwood and his encounters with the _kali vastu_. The older man asks several questions, many of which Remus answers with a regretful, "I don't know." When Remus reaches the point in his story where he lost seven days to the heartwood, Matsyamohandra sits back in his chair and says nothing.

"Will you tell me what you know about it--the heartwood?" Remus asks finally, feeling indistinctly guilty for breaking the long silence. A slight breeze stirs the air, tickling the hair on his neck, and he glances at the open window before going on, "I don't understand why some magic works there but some doesn't. It seems quite arbitrary."

"Arbitrary?" Matsyamohandra raises an eyebrow. "Surely you can see how unlikely that is."

Remus thinks, _Surely I can't, else I wouldn't have said it._ He looks away from Matsyamohandra again, his gaze falling on the jade Buddha. It is a truly superb piece of statuary, the pale green stone almost luminescent in the candlelight. Remus wonders what temple lost its icon to decorate this library.

Out loud, he says, "I don't understand."

"Can you see no pattern in the spells you used?"

_Asperix_: the Suffocating Spell. _Sanguinis_: the Bleeding Curse. He considered and tried others, but only those two were effective. The most obvious pattern, Remus thinks, is that both spells are violent, illegal and generally frowned upon in polite society. He recalls suddenly an exhausted Frank Longbottom telling the Order about a family of Muggle bricklayers killed by the Bleeding Curse, a father and two sons left in a bloody heap among their trowels and chisels, Dark Mark shining overhead, found by their Healer sister after her late shift at St. Mungo's. _Bricklayers_, Frank had practically spat the word, pacing furiously, _now they're killing bricklayers. What, are they afraid the Muggles will build a bloody great wall to keep them out?_

Remus swallows and says slowly. "Both are physically damaging."

"Predatory."

The single word is sharp, loud and sudden, startling Remus. He immediately looks away from the Buddha. Meeting Matsyamohandra's eyes across the table, Remus opens his mouth, then changes his mind and remains silent.

When it becomes apparent that Matsyamohandra is not going to say anything more, Remus cautiously agrees, "Yes. I suppose so."

"Tooth and claw."

Remus shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

"Crush and bleed, the methods of the great natural hunters."

"What are you saying?"

Matsyamohandra smiles suddenly and stands up. "It is late, dear boy, and I have travelled far today. We will speak again tomorrow. Li tells me the students are quite fond of you. I look forward to seeing what they have learned."

He nods a good night and walks quickly from the library, closing the door silently behind him. The night breeze shuffles the pages of the open journal on the table. Remus closes the journal and keeps his hand on the cover, idly tracing the single embossed word, _Maxwell_, with his forefinger.

Exhaling slowly and leaning back, Remus stretches his legs before him. He runs a hand over his face and looks past the jade Buddha, through the open window and into the night.

* * *

In the morning Matsyamohandra is duly impressed with Remus' map, though he doesn't seem at all surprised by anything Remus has learned about the heartwood. He is greatly amused by Remus' admission that all he knows of hunting he learned from Jim Corbett and says, cryptically, "Tigers are magnificent beasts, but theirs is a magic too easily understood." Matsyamohandra agrees, eventually, to share what he understands about Maxwell's theories, although he does so with the air of one humouring a child rather than providing vital information.

"Maxwell was a man of many theories," Matsyamohandra explains. "If he saw a tree, he developed a theory. A bird in the tree was worth two theories. A bird devouring a worm in a tree? Why, that was worth one hundred pages of philosophical treatise. But you must understand: he never studied the heartwoods for themselves. Do you know what Maxwell is most famous for?"

"His work in transfiguration," Remus answers. "The Animagus transformation, specifically."

"Yes, of course, though wizards have mastered the Animagus transformation for hundreds, thousands of years. It is said that ancient shamans could take any animal form they pleased, did you know that?"

Remus does know that; he remembers a heated debate in the Gryffindor boys' dormitory that led to an impossible bet about who would achieve the Polyanimagus status first, never mind that Polyanimagi exist only in myths. Five Galleons, two bottles of Firewhiskey, four bars of Delilah Periwinkle's Daringly Delicious Almond Chocolate Delight and the requirement that the loser name his firstborn son after the winner. That was the wager, one that nobody will ever win.

Matsyamohandra is still speaking. "...and that is all that interested Maxwell, what he called the 'transformative properties' of the heartwood -- it's ability to change size and shape seemingly at will, to keep intruders out. Or to keep them in," Matsyamohandra says, giving Remus a significant look. "Maxwell himself was quite frustrated, as he could only enter the heartwood in his animal form--a golden monkey--and a monkey has trouble taking notes. His observations, therefore, are rather difficult to decipher, many of them detailing the quality of the bananas and ease of travelling through the canopy. I am not an Animagus, so I have never been able to verify his findings."

"I'm not an Animagus, either," Remus points out.

"No. You are something else entirely."

Remus is silent, thinking about the pungent odour of damp earth, the subtle scent of flowers, the cool night air and silver moonlight.

Finally, he says, "You're saying that I can enter the heartwood because I'm a werewolf?"

Matsyamohandra's eyes, deep royal blue, are sparkling. "I'm saying that, perhaps, the heartwood and its creature feel no need to hide from a kindred spirit. But, of course, it is only a theory."

"That doesn't help me find a way to stop the _kali vastu_."

"Ah, yes. Chandrasekhar's request."

"You don't seem to agree with him."

Matsyamohandra shrugs his thin shoulders. "Chandrasekhar is an old friend, but we do not always see eye to eye. He chooses the title and the government, the game of bureaucracy and conciliation that he learned on your English shores, while I choose this humble _skul_ and the boys who have grown so fond of your flying cockroaches. Perhaps we both wish to see India become a place of magic and power once again, but sometimes I think Chandrasekhar is afraid of what that means."

Remus wonders silently what part Matsyamohandra played in the Kashmiri sect's attempt to halt the war between India and Pakistan. "The _kali vastu_ is killing villagers," he says evenly. "Do you think I'm wrong to try to stop it?"

"I think you do not know what the _kali vastu_ is."

Annoyed, Remus agrees, "Of course I don't. As I've told you, repeatedly, I've never seen anything like it, or read about anything similar. If you know more than you've said, by all means--"

Matsyamohandra is laughing. Quietly, gently, but laughing nonetheless. "It is so difficult to explain to an Englishman." He shakes his head. "What do you see when you look at India, Remus Lupin? Do you see a hot, crowded, filthy place, a nation of struggle and grief, a new challenge or horror around every dirty corner? Do you see a frustrating place where insects and gods outnumber sensible men such as yourself? Have you given no thought to why we are this way, why the British wizards could not stay, though you are wealthy, educated, civilised and so very determined to force the magical world into clean Latin phrases and crisp wand movements? There is as much magic flowing in that river you see through the window as in all of England, but it is not magic that can be tamed or tricked or caught for the trifling uses of mankind. This is not a land of charms, hexes and carefully crafted potions. This is a land where even the gods are submissive to the land, changing, mutating and multiplying because they cannot keep pace with the fierce, wild magic that flows from the mountains themselves.

"Maxwell knew this; it is why he came to India to die. He knew that the clever incantations and precise theories of his English colleagues were nothing more than child's play. Grown men studying for years to turn into bears and dogs--was that the culmination of his life's work? Was that all he had accomplished after one hundred years of research? Of course not. Maxwell's greatest discovery was that the magic that transforms, the magic that creates heartwoods and dark creatures, the magic that defies careful Western training and keeps our land in perpetual chaos, it is the oldest, most powerful magic. It is what keeps the rules and laws from strangling our magical world entirely."

Matsyamohandra stops abruptly. His smile is gone; he is looking past the jade Buddha, through the window at the blue sky shimmering with midday heat. After a moment, he continues, "I am an old man. Li tells me I must allow the boys to learn charms and spells, teach them about numbers and potion brewing, because that is the only way to keep their magic alive. And I know, in a way, she must be right. That is the trouble with Tibetan witches," Matsyamohandra shakes his head ruefully, "they are so often right. What do you think, young man?"

Remus considers his words carefully. "If what you say is true--if the land survives on untamed magic--where is the harm in teaching your children to use it?"

"Use it for what? Use it to make their lives easier? Use it to gain power, to fight one another? To learn to control the elements, as every Dark Wizard has done since Setekh harnessed the winds of Egypt to bury peaceful farmers in cascades of sand? To steal the minds of others and manipulate them to their will, a skill at which your recently defeated enemy in England was so talented? An interesting viewpoint for a young man who has just fought a war against dark magic. You see no danger in what you suggest? The boys as they are, they are harmless, yet you would give them the tools to change that. Is that a position you can defend to yourself, to your friends and family?"

"I can't defend it to my friends and family," Remus says, forcing himself to speak calmly, "because they are all dead. As for myself, I have fought darkness my entire life, a war that has nothing to do with any Dark Wizard or misuse of magic. There is a difference between fighting dark magic and fighting human weakness."

Slowly, Matsyamohandra turns from the window to look at Remus. "Perhaps you are right. What is your plan?"

"Plan?" Remus frowns, confused.

Matsyamohandra gestures at the stack of journals. "The heartwood, the _kali vastu_. You will not allow it to continue devouring villagers, will you?"

Sighing, Remus says, "No, I won't. But I don't have a plan."

"Don't you?"

Remus doesn't answer.

"It is only a theory," Matsyamohandra says. He smiles, though his eyes are sad.

* * *

Remus stays at the ashram for a few more days. He teaches the boys under Matsyamohandra's indecipherable gaze and reads a bit more in the journals, focusing on the passages the old man points out as relevant to the heartwood. One afternoon, Salil comes through the gate and says, "Tomorrow we go, yes?"

Glancing at Matsyamohandra, Remus agrees. "Tomorrow, yes."

After supper, Remus says to Li, "I don't understand what he's trying to tell me."

Li laughs, "Ah, so now you see how it is."

Vijay adds, "Don't worry. We never understand, either. But you do have a plan?"

Remus shrugs. "I don't know."

But he does know. He sleeps fitfully that night, tossing on the comfortable bed until the sheet is tangled around his legs. Finally he gives up and steps onto the rooftop; he looks over the sleeping city until the sky lightens to grey in the east. Then he leaves the ashram and walks down to the river. The city feels huge and empty in the hour before sunrise, the streets wider and the buildings taller. The riverside is not deserted, though; _sadhus_ and yogis pray in silence, their orange robes muted like dying embers in the dim light. Remus finds an empty spot and sits on the cold cement, wrapping his arms around his knees and watching the river, swift and powerful. The sky gives itself over to dawn; grey fades to pink, pink to orange, and the riverside comes alive. Voices ring out in prayer and a group of women pass behind Remus, chatting cheerfully as they make their way to the water with laundry baskets balanced on their heads. Cart wheels rattle, dogs bark, a car horn sounds in the distance.

About twenty feet downriver, a gaunt old man removes his ragged clothes and immerses himself in the water, holding tight to a thick chain as he ducks beneath the current. Just past the old man, a solitary woman in a brilliant blue _sari_ unfolds a white cloth and releases a cloud of grey ashes; she watches the river carry the dust away, then closes her eyes for a moment before turning from the water, gracefully climbing the steps and vanishing into an alley between two buildings.

Standing up, Remus unbuttons his shirt and folds it neatly on the steps. He removes his trousers and steps into the water, suppressing a gasp at the surprising cold, and takes hold of a chain. Lowering himself slowly into the river, he holds his breath and immerses himself completely. For several long moments he stays beneath the water, blind and braced against the current.

Remus climbs from the river just as the sun rises. The red and white temples glow with the first rays of sunlight, and the cacophony of traffic is punctuated by shouts and prayers as the _ghats_ grow more crowded. The old man downstream gives him a wide, toothless grin and says something Remus doesn't understand. He returns the smile but remains silent. A few minutes in the pale morning sunlight and he is sufficiently dry; Remus dresses and shakes the water from his hair. He remains at the riverside for a bit longer, admiring the way the water reflects the dawn.

The moon will be full in seven days.


	6. Chapter 6

Remus and Rakesh are walking to the bungalow after dinner. Remus knows that Rakesh has many questions, so he walks slowly, hands in pockets, waiting patiently to be asked. It has rained during his absence and the village is muddy and damp; the men tell Remus the monsoon is coming.

"The wise man," Rakesh begins, stopping outside the bungalow, "what did he tell you?"

The _kali vastu_ took two young male buffalo while Remus was in Haridwar. One belonged to a young man whose father had died of malaria the year before; he sold all of his father's belongings to pay old debts, and a single gaunt buffalo was all he had left. The people of Pakhari are still afraid to go out after dark, although their anxiety lessens with each night the creature remains unheard. Even with two bloody feet as proof, the villagers ask Remus if he is certain he did not kill it, whether it is possible that it bled to death after all, can he find its corpse in the jungle and bring it for them to see. Remus is stern when he warns the people to stay away from the jungle in the dark, worried that their hope will outweigh his warnings.

He takes in a long, careful breath before answering Rakesh. "There may be a way to kill it," he says. "There may be a...a weapon I can use."

Rakesh does not press him for details. His dark eyes are solemn when he says, "That will be a good thing. The people," he sweeps his hand out to indicate the village, hushed and fragrant with the smoke from cooking fires, "we are brave, but there is fear. If the _kali vastu_ lives, so does our fear." He bids Remus good night and walks slowly away, peering into the darkening jungle.

Standing in the doorway of the bungalow, Remus watches the shadows thoughtfully. He will not go to the pump tonight; he can still feel his early morning bath in the Ganges, a cool breath that has caressed his skin all day, intensifying the tingle in his new scars and reviving faded embers, almost forgotten, in the werewolf bite on his shoulder. These sensations are stronger now, so close to the heartwood, and Remus is afraid of doing anything that will diminish the lingering fire.

Remus shakes his head and pushes away from the doorframe. Darkness has fallen, and the jungle's nightly symphony breaks through his reverie. He pushes the curtain aside and steps into the room, muttering, "_Lumos_," and automatically glancing upward to see if the geckos are in their usual spot on the ceiling. There is only one tonight, and though Remus looks over the walls and floor, the other is nowhere to be found. Even though it is still early, Remus lies down on the bed and stares at the ceiling for a few minutes. Then he sits up and retrieves the Corbett paperback from his case and begins turning the pages idly, more for something to do than for any interest in the words.

_The length of road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to the right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadows, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadows moved, I saw a dozen tigers advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater's mercy._

Remus lowers the book to his chest and turns his head to look at the curtain swaying in the gentle breeze. The air is alive tonight, rich with motion and scent. A storm is blowing up from the plains and the trees quake in anticipation.

_I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night._

Derision had coloured Matsyamohandra's voice when he called Remus a sensible man. Remus gives a sigh that sounds, even to his own ears, ridiculously melodramatic. Scanning the chapter, he searches for the passages he underlined upon first reading.

_I was young and inexperienced in those far-off Champawat days, but, even so, the conviction I came to after a brief sojourn in that stricken land, that there is no more terrible thing than to live and have one's being under the shadow of a man-eater...._

Eventually he extinguishes the light. The second gecko does not appear, and Remus feels the absurd urge to ask the first where his companion has gone for the night. He thinks of snakes, buffalo hooves, laughing young boys, and considers the various fates that might befall a gecko.

Someday, he tells himself, someday he will look back on his far-off Pakhari days with fondness and nostalgia. He will remember the way the villagers crowd him with wide smiles and easy greetings, will remember sipping _chai_ in Rakesh's house and washing at the pump. The recollection of bitter fear will be no more than a curious sequence of actions and reactions that he observes as if in a Muggle film, cinematic sleights of hand to conjure a formulaic _terror_. In years to come, he tells himself, the memories will fade, the emotions will pale, the details will blur, and there will be a time when he pages through his remembrance and cannot fix the date

_midnight, 20 October 1975_

cannot recall the words

_I don't know, I can't explain, I don't know what I was thinking, I don't know_

cannot feel the bile that wells up in his throat, the rattle of his own harsh breaths, hot, dry eyes, a dull ache in his ribs, a murmur of low voices trying not to wake him, agonising weeks of feeling the desperate storm-grey gaze on his back every time he turns away. There will be a time when he forgets his final weary pronouncement:_ It is the worst possible thing you could have done. I am not your weapon._

Swallowing hard, Remus concentrates on slow, steady breathing.

He says, quietly, "This is different."

He was wrong, after all. There is always something worse.

He closes his eyes.

For the first time since the night he arrived in India, he dreams about hands.

* * *

Remus moves through the next few days in a stupor. He knows, despite the eager questions from the villagers and Rakesh's solemn looks, that his conviction, never solid to begin with, is wavering. Walking aimlessly through the jungle, along the border of the heartwood north of the spring, he thinks, _I am a sensible man. Sensible men always have options. _

Creeping into Remus' mind in quiet moments, Matsyamohandra's eyes glow from his Buddha face, the same colour as the skin of deities printed on cheap icons that disintegrate when splashed with river water. The Gandhi poise, the Buddha smile and the tired certainty of an old, old man remind Remus of what he suspected from his first confused minutes at the Ministry in Delhi: India is no place for logic. Sensible men remain so only as long as they shut their eyes against the sting of incense and close their ears to the wailing of a grieving mother. Cast a simple _Mendicus repellere_ and a sensible man can move easily about the squalid streets and choked fields, pausing only to wipe the mud from his shoes. _Fangworthy_, Remus thinks wryly, _was a sensible man_.

He finds the now-familiar log by the spring and sits, resting his elbows on his knees and listening to the cheerful gurgle of water. The reasonable part of his mind knows that the full moon is still three days away, but he feels her pull nonetheless, the tightening of muscles and itch of ungrown hair. He finds it hard to sit still for more than a few minutes and soon he is walking again, aiming this time toward the old man with the ginger-root field up the valley. Though he skirts the heartwood, the sun is low in the sky, slanting long shadows across the valley by the time he reaches the old man's house.

The man greets him cheerfully. Like a small boy turning to his grandfather for a favourite tale, Remus accepts the offer of tea and settles into the dim little room as the old man once again relates the story of the time he helped Jim Corbett track a man-eater through the hills near his boyhood home. He tells Remus how Corbett carried one gun and only a handful of bullets, how he always insisted upon hunting alone because he could not bear to be responsible for the lives of the scared, hopeful, desperate villagers who called upon him. The old man's wife comes into the house and stokes the fire, speaking to her husband in soft Hindi and smiling brightly when Remus accepts her invitation for dinner. She mixes flour and water in a terracotta bowl, chops an onion with a jagged blade and bids her husband ask Remus if he likes eggs.

Leaning back against the mud-brick wall, Remus extends his legs casually over the pallet that serves as a makeshift bed. As the woman cooks, the tiny house fills with fragrant smoke, rendering the old man and his wife vague, muted forms in the scant light. Her battered pots clank as she shifts them around over the fire, but the sound is heavy and low, as if they are all underwater and the only one who can speak Mermish is the old man, his voice constant and clear through the haze. The smoke swirls and the cool night-time air enters the room through the open door, but Remus barely notices when the old woman steps outside to bring in more wood for the fire.

Lifting the teapot, the old man motions for Remus to hold his chipped glass for a refill. He begins to pour.

Remus registers the scream and the scald of water on his hand at the same time.

For one moment, both he and the old man are frozen. With the second scream, the old man drops the teapot, splashing tea and sodden leaves across the floor. Remus scrambles to his feet and shoves the old man aside, shouting a desperate, "_Stay inside!_" before hurtling through the door and drawing his wand.

In the light of the early-risen moon, Remus sees that the _kali vastu_ has dragged the old woman to the edge of the jungle and is crouching over her at the base of a leafy mango tree. The sickly sweet smell of crushed fruit mingles with earth and blood.

The creature raises its golden eyes, sees Remus, and screams.

"_Asperix!_"

The scream cuts off and the creature rolls backward, melding into the shadows. It pauses, seemingly uncertain; Remus aims his wand and shouts again, "_Asperix!_" This time the darkness surges forward and close over the creature, wisps and tendrils dragging at its teeth and claws, narrowing the golden eyes as the _kali vastu_ strains forward. Remus takes a few running steps forward, and the creature wheels around. A swirl of moonlight spun in its wake, it vanishes into the jungle.

Falling to his knees beside the woman, Remus turns her onto her back and curses violently. The _kali vastu's_ great claws have slashed her face and chest, leaving gaping wounds that extend from mid-torso to the line of her scalp.

"Oh, Merlin, oh, damn it, no, come on," Remus whispers, leaning closer to her mouth. She is still breathing, although the inspiration is shallow and strangled by liquid. Her eyes are rolled back, startling and white against the brown and red of her bloody face.

A cry rings behind him and the old man falls to his knees beside Remus, saying his wife's name, "_Surya, Surya, Surya_," over and over again.

Remus pushes him back and slips one arm under the woman's shoulders, the other beneath her knees, lifting her childlike frame easily. Just before turning, he glances into the jungle. The _kali vastu's_ great unblinking eyes glow in the shadows, far enough into the gloom to be little more than golden spots, but nonetheless unmistakable. Remus tears his gaze away and runs into the house, the old man close on his heels.

He sets the old woman on the bed and tears at the shredded remains of her dress. The wounds are ugly, but as he probes he realises that they have barely punctured her chest cavity; the blood in her throat is from her face, not her lungs. Remus looks up at the old man for the briefest second, then adjusts his slippery, bloody grip on his wand and points it determinedly at the woman's wounds. _Please, please, let there be just one of the millions of gods watching. Please._

"_Sanitorus,_" he says firmly. A shiver of cool air washes through the room, and some of the spilled blood and caked dirt vanishes from the woman's face and chest. Remus mutters the spell again, and again, then focuses on her flowing head wound and says, "_Coagulatus_." The bleeding slows, but not enough, so he tries again, quashing his growing frustration at the weak spells, until the bleeding from her scalp is slowed to a seep. He does the same with her chest but is unable to stop the bleeding completely, so he takes in a deep breath and says, "_Suturus_," tracing his wand along the deepest of the cuts. The flesh pulls together slightly but does not seal; cursing, Remus regrips his wand and winces at the sharp pain in his scalded hand. He casts the charm again, drawing his spell across the gash in her scalp. Again the tissue strains together but the spell is too weak to close the wounds entirely. Remus casts the charm again and again, finally pulling back with a vehement, "_Goddamnit_, why won't you _work?_"

A hand on his shoulder startles him. It is the old man, holding a pile of mostly-clean rags. His eyes are wide and bright in the firelight, his mouth open in a mute, awed 'O'. Remus looks at the woman's angry red wounds, still leaking blood, and accepts the bandages silently. As he is wrapping the woman's head, she makes a small, startled noise and her eyes flutter, snapping to focus and resting on his face. She tries to say something but her voice is barely a whisper of a breath, so her husband hushes her and takes her hand while Remus dresses her injuries.

When he is done, he moves away to let the old man sit next to his wife. The man does not take his eyes off Remus' face for a long moment. Then he glances at the wand in Remus' hand, both wand and fingers sticky with drying blood, and lifts his eyes to Remus' again. His voice a hoarse whisper, the man says, "_Abhichaara_." He raises a single finger to his lips and adds an earnest, "_Shhhh._"

Remus doesn't reply. He hunches his shoulders and looks down at his hands, slowly releasing the breath he didn't know he was holding. His right hand begins to throb where it was splashed with near-boiling water, but he makes no move to heal the burn.

A group of villagers hurry up the valley to the old man's house, drawn by the screams, huddled together and terrified in the insufficient light of their torches. The old man tells them what happened while Remus watches over the woman; she drifts in and out of consciousness, but her breathing is steady and she seems alert when she is awake. Remus stays with her until dawn, then leaves her in the care of the village women. He washes at the pump while the villagers crowd around, asking him about the attack. He answers their questions wearily and pushes through the crowd to his bungalow, too tired to acknowledge their renewed thanks, worries and fears. Rakesh's mother insists upon taking Remus' blood-stained shirt, smiling and nodding her silent promise to clean it, and Rakesh tells the villagers sternly to let Mr. Lupin sleep for a few hours before pestering him with more questions. Gratefully, Remus thanks the young man and steps into his bungalow. He can hear the villagers muttering outside, but he ignores them and falls onto the bed.

He dozes but does not sleep. The bungalow is uncomfortably hot during the day, and Remus tosses and turns restlessly, finally settling on his back with his legs drawn up and his arm flung over his eyes to block the light. The three long scars on his left arm are afire with a strange, crawling sensation, and though he has scrubbed himself raw, he can still smell blood on the skin of the arm pressed against his face.

Remus knows he can rationalise no more. In the moment his eyes met the _kali vastu's_ through the shadowed tangle of moonlit jungle, they both understood. The villagers, stray dogs and wandering buffalo are, in the _kali vastu's_ hot golden eyes, nothing more than prey. But Remus is different; Remus stole the creature's prize while it cowered in the shadows. He is the rival encroaching upon its territory, a challenge that the creature cannot ignore.

* * *

Two days later, Remus speaks earnestly to Rakesh at the edge of the village.

"No matter what happens, no matter what you hear, the villagers absolutely _cannot_ leave their homes tonight. You must bar your doors and stay inside until sunrise. Do _not_ go outside after the sun sets and do _not_ come outside before the sun is up. Do you understand?"

Rakesh nods silently, edging away slightly, and Remus realises he is leaning toward the young man. He steps back automatically and inhales once, twice, running a hand over his face and closing his eyes.

"This is very important," he says, for perhaps the fourth time.

"Yes."

"Nobody can be outside. They will not be safe."

"The _kali vastu_ is hunting tonight?"

Remus looks at the young man steadily, then turns his gaze to the jungle, a peaceful, variegated green in the midday sun. They have already spread warning to the nearest villages, though they are not in as much danger. The rich scent of the _kali vastu_ dances in his mind, just beyond reason or logic, entwined with instincts he has spent years ignoring.

"No," he says quietly. "I am hunting tonight."

Yesterday he turned Salil away when the car came to take him to Nainital. Salil argued, but as they were standing in full view of the villagers there was little he could say. He finally gave in, shaking his head and worrying, "Mr. Chandrasekhar will not like this. He will not like this." Remus suspects, however, that Chandrasekhar will understand when Salil returns without Remus. He writes a letter for Chandrasekhar, with an attached note for Professor Kettleburn, and leaves them with the map in the bungalow. Rakesh's mother was unable to completely remove the bloodstains, so he dons the ruined shirt and the patched trousers that have been fighting a losing battle against thorns since he arrived in Pakhari.

The old man and his wife have moved to their son's house in the village. She will probably never recover fully; she is too old and too frail. But she is alive, and the couple is tearful with thanks when Remus sits awkwardly in the stuffy room, sipping tea and promising that tonight he will do all he can to find the _kali vastu_. Their son and Rakesh share a whispered conversation just outside the house while Remus talks to the couple. When he emerges, blinking, into the sunlight, they tell him that they have decided to stay in the house by the ginger-root field.

Remus protests, "No. There is nothing you can do. It is too dangerous."

"Last time you came from the jungle bleeding," Rakesh points out.

"We stay in house, before sun rises," the other young man says, his English rougher but his meaning just as clear.

"No. You can't. I won't allow it."

Both men regard him with dark, serious eyes, their staunch expressions nearly identical. Rakesh says, evenly, "You may need help in the morning."

Remus doesn't know how much Rakesh has guessed. The young man's sober demeanour hides a great deal. He looks from one man to the other; they are tall and lanky, strong from years of toil in the fields and jungles, and resolutely immovable. In a white-hot flash of memory he sees another pair of black-haired boys, standing before him with unyielding determination, awaiting his reply even though they have clearly decided to do as they please regardless of what he says.

His voice shakes when he turns away and gives in. "Okay. Yes. Okay. But you cannot go outside until after sunrise, not for anything. Is that clear?"

"Yes."

"_Ji ha_, Mister Lupin."

The afternoon is interminable. Remus has nothing to do except avoid the villagers and try, unsuccessfully, to steer his thoughts away from the night ahead. As the shadows grow long, Remus decides it is time to go up the valley. He refuses an offer of food from Rakesh's mother; he is hungry, but he wants to stay that way. He walks slowly along the road, the two young men trailing behind. Leaving his wand in the old man's house, he repeats his desperate instruction that they barricade themselves inside until morning.

Remus walks into the jungle as the sun sets.

The heartwood does not protest. Every one of his scars, even those he gave himself, burns with a strange, tantalising, enthralling fire. Remus undresses and folds his clothes, setting them on his shoes at the base of a tree. Then he looks down at the neat pile and laughs ruefully: _A tidy werewolf walks into a heartwood_....

"Ten points to Gryffindor for whomever guesses the punch line," he murmurs.

He continues deeper into the heartwood, flinching at the feel of the rough ground on his bare feet. The insects sing all around. He feels the tickle of a mosquito on his arm and looks down at it; he brushes it away, wondering if his blood tastes different to a mosquito, and whether the taste is sweeter than a buffalo, more bitter than a man.

Since his first terrifying night in the cage behind his childhood home, Remus has always known exactly when the full moon will rise. As the moment nears, he stops and stands in the centre of a small clearing, absently running the fingers of his right hand along his left forearm, still feeling the brief touch of the mosquito though the insect is long gone.

Every muscle screams simultaneously. Remus hisses and closes his eyes.

The transformation seizes him like a full-body bind; his muscles go rigid in the moment before they begin to tear and reform, his back arches in agony as his bones snap and splinter. His skin rips in every place at once, and the hair grows like a thousand agitated snakes. He falls forward, pressing his face into the damp earth, desperately focusing on a single broken branch just inches from his eyes, drawing in one ragged breath before the jungle is washed with silver light.

* * *

The wolf lifts his head and struggles to his feet, shaking off the residual soreness and inhaling deeply. At first he is bewildered; there is no cage, no stench of humans, no chains, no boards beneath his paws or walls blocking the moonlight. He sniffs around cautiously, relishing the fertile, complex layering of scents, studying the patterns of light and dark, noting the gentle caress of a breeze through his fur. He takes a few hesitant steps, searching for the barrier he knows must be there. But nothing impedes his motion. There is only the forest, the wolf and the night.

And something else.

Its scent, more alive than the rot of wood and crumble of earth, drifts across his snout, and the wolf snaps his head around. Not human, not stag or dog or rat. Not far and not friendly. The scent is soaked with blood, almost human but thicker and stronger.

The wolf raises his head to the moon and howls.

The _other_ answers immediately. Its long, drawn-out reply is unmistakable: _The forest is mine._

A low growl builds in the wolf's throat.

The forest is free of chains and walls; the forest is empty of humans; it is alight with a brilliant silver glow; it smells like life and stretches forever on every side; there are logs and trees, thickets and hollows; there is a memory on the air and the challenge of a hunt.

The wolf howls again, head thrown back, even as the _other_ screams its challenge, closer now. The wolf growls and crouches, waiting. The scent of the other intensifies and grows, becoming a palpable darkness. The wolf is restless with hunger and eager to hunt. He leaves the clearing, ducking into the shadows, tracing the scent, silently stalking the tendril of breeze.

Sniffing the ground, pausing every few steps to listen in the shadows, the wolf moves in the direction of the _other_, but the _other_ remains silent and the wolf cannot see it. The scent is everywhere at once, but the breeze dies and there is no longer direction, no longer distance. The wolf pauses, fur bristling, and waits.

The forest is silent. There is no motion in the moonlight.

The _other_ howls.

The wolf whirls around to face the sound. He darts forward, then stops. The scent of the _other_ is strong, yet the cry was so similar to his own he is momentarily uncertain, pacing from side to side, giving a few half-hearted whines of confusion before finally bracing himself and howling in reply.

The _other_ howls again, strong and near, but as the voice surges through the night air and lingers, something in the sound shifts. The wolf's bay collapses into an angry rumbling growl that trembles on the moonlight. _Imposter_. The smell is wrong; the call is wrong. The wolf lowers his head and creeps forward, wary of the shadows and thick bushes, focused solely on _scent:_ blood and earth, the whiff of a small torn creature limp on the ground, of places long-abandoned by humans, of sweet tastes and hot blood and a thrilling _crunch_ the wolf can barely remember.

But the scent, in its potency, is confusing. It follows a wisp of breeze this way, a breath of air that, growing neither stronger nor richer. The wolf stops, abruptly peering into the darkness where the darkness just shifted. He watches until it moves again, a slow gentle rolling, like the body of a thick black snake curling around the base of a tree. But the motion fades and then there is nothing but the tree and the shadows. The wolf paces anxiously, nosing toward the tree and doubling back, seeing no more movement but careful of the darkness that hides the great snake.

Minutes pass. There is nothing in the shadows and the wolf is growing impatient. He becomes more reckless, rounding trees without hesitation and trotting quickly through the forest. When the scent begins to slacken, he turns around and traces it again; he barks once or twice but receives no reply. The moon is high and the shadows short.

Then, through the trees to the side, he glimpses a flicker of movement.

The wolf stops, as does the shadow.

Cautiously, the wolf trots forward a few steps. The darkness mirrors his motion, staying alongside him, just far enough away to be hidden by the tree trunks and tangled bushes. The wolf moves again, luring the shadow into a patch of moonlight. The shadow pauses at the edge then darts across the light, a smear of black against the mottled forest, but its shape and loping steps are defined for the briefest second. The wolf bounds forward, forgetting his hunt, forgetting the blood-soaked scent and ravenous hunger and the _other. _He barks excitedly in greeting. He remembers the tumble and chase through trees and hollows; this is familiar; this he knows. _Dog._

The wolf skids into the clearing and stops, panting, ears perked as he looks about expectantly. His eyes scan the surrounding shadows but see no movement. Slowly his caution returns and he slinks closer to the edge of the clearing, no longer certain of the game.

Before he reaches the safety of darkness, a shadow before him moves, and the scent of the _other_ fills his senses in a sudden angry surge. The silver moonlight outlines a hunch of massive canine shoulders and a great shaggy head, but even as the wolf whines and backs away uneasily the shape shifts and deforms, elongating slowly. Limbs that might have been paws grow and reach into the low branches of the nearest tree. Now they are thin, spindly, and brushed with wiry hair. The _other_ wavers briefly on indistinguishably fluid limbs, and the wolf's mind hungrily snarls _man_ before the shadow changes again, familiar form fading, and the _other_ begins to climb, flowing up the side of the tree, leaving a rustling, bewildering shiver of leaves in its wake.

Whining fearfully, the wolf stumbles backward, trying to keep his head raised and his eyes on the trembling branches overhead. He strains his neck and twists in fretful circles, but there is a breeze above and every leaf is fluttering unsteadily between silver and darkness, the night suddenly filled with too much noise and motion. The wolf cannot see the _other_, cannot distinguish its shape from the silhouettes of swaying, creaking branches.

Then, all at once, the moonlight is gone and the forest is dark.

The wolf hears a shuddering beat of air and sees the shadows spread over him, the sky blocked by great, featureless wings as the _other_ leaps from the trees overhead. The wolf darts for the bushes as the _other_ swoops toward him; one clawed limb lashes out and catches the wolf's hind leg as it lands soundlessly on the forest floor. The wolf yelps and wheels around, snapping viciously, but the _other_ is rolling backward, wings reabsorbed as the shape shifts, rearranges, fades back and settles into the shadows, finally lifting a smooth face to watch the wolf with two bright, unblinking eyes.

Favouring his hind leg, which burns where the _other_ tore the skin, the wolf retreats further into the thicket, whining and growling at the bright eyes ablaze in the darkness. The _other _is stalking him now, biding its time. It rolls behind the shadows, emerging as a long lone figure before fading again. The wolf slinks into the forest and pauses to lick his wound, glancing up between each stroke of his tongue to keep the eyes in sight. He can taste the _other_ in his own fur, in his blood, the scent tantalising and powerful, the scent of a rival. The scent of prey.

Then he looks up and the eyes are gone.

The darkness no longer ripples; the _other _has vanished.

The wolf is alert, unmoving, waiting.

Slowly he begins to creep along the edge of the clearing, ungraceful on his hind leg, pausing every few steps to peer into the shadows.

He rounds the clearing to where he last saw the eyes, and there is nothing. The rich odour of the _other_ remains, but there is nothing crouching beneath the bushes, nothing lurking behind the trees. The wolf sniffs around worriedly, then stops again to lick his leg, trying to draw the fierce, steady fire out of the wound.

A huff of breath nearby.

The wolf freezes.

He raises his head, slowly, and lowers his wounded leg to the ground.

Golden eyes meet his through a tangle of trees and shrubs. The wolf tenses and pauses with indecision. The _other_ is near enough for him to spring, but he cannot see the outline of its body. He cannot see its claws or teeth or limbs; he can only see the eyes, wide and unblinking through the leaves. Another breath and he can smell the _other_, the scent so strong it washes over his mind like the first hint of moonlight, burying all other senses and all other hungers beneath its thick, rich flavour.

Wolf and _other _are silent. Both are waiting.

The _other_ springs.

The wolf reacts before the _other_ strikes, diving back and to the side, avoiding the long, curving teeth but feeling a claw catch his foreleg. The _other_ lands in a low crouch and surges forward immediately; the wolf feels the air rip over his head as the _other_ wrenches free of the shadows, two long forelimbs lashing and catching only dirt. The wolf snaps his jaws at the _other_ but catches nothing; the _other_ ripples back and the wolf feels only a hot brush of air, a tremble of shadow. The _other_ lashes out again and he frantically rolls to avoid the claw.

For a moment wolf and _other_ circle one another. The wolf cannot find a flank or identify a limb; he lunges and feints, the thrill of the fight overpowering the burn in his legs. He crouches low to the ground and growls ferociously, but the _other_ flows just beyond reach, its wide eyes unblinking, its motion unchecked.

The wolf leaps desperately at the _other's_ head, fixing the eyes as his target, but just before he strikes the _other_ snaps its jaw upward, massive teeth ripping from the shadows below the eyes. The wolf's teeth find no purchase; his paws pass through the rippling shadow as though swimming through murky water. The _other _throws the wolf aside with one decisive toss of its head, and the wolf slams into the base of a tree. He whimpers, dazed, before struggling to his feet and slinking backward, cowering at the edge of the forest. The _other_ lowers its head, teeth and forelimbs now vivid, shimmering and black against the moonlit clearing, and exhales one long, low breath. Hunched low against the ground, the wolf edges further back, growling and whining.

When the _other_ pounces again, the wolf dodges to the side, tumbling recklessly head over feet and crashing through a thick shrub. The _other_ screams in frustration, its smooth, gleaming face stretched toward the wolf.

In that moment the wolf sees a weakness: _neck_.

The wolf leaps to his feet and lunges, closing his jaw on the smooth, moonlit throat, and the _other's_ cry chokes off in a high-pitched strangle. The _other_ jerks fiercely, tossing its head to dislodge the wolf, but the wolf holds and digs his paws into the earth, sinking his teeth through thick neck. Massive jaws hold tight even when the _other_ slashes its claws across his back, shredding the wolf's skin. Hot, sweet blood spurts down the wolf's throat, spurring him into a frenzy of shaking and thrashing. His own gurgling growls mingle with the gasping, wheezing whine of the _other_. A claw catches the wolf again, piercing his side so sharply he releases the neck in shock. Wolf and _other_ stumble away from one another, panting, bleeding, trembling.

The _other_ stumbles forward, its form suddenly delineated, traced by the moonlight across its body. It feints weakly, head low, and when the wolf lunges again the _other_ rolls away before his jaws can close on the back of its neck. They circle each other, staggering and bleeding. The _other_ begins to move backward and the wolf lunges yet again, concentrating his strength on the desperate spring and on closing his jaws on the soft, vulnerable flesh. He holds as the _other_ whirls and flails, dragging him against the ground and lashing with its claws in ever-weakening strikes, hot blood flowing freely over the wolf's fur until the _other's_ limbs collapse and it is still.

Gasping, the wolf falls atop the _other_, their blood mixing on the jungle floor. He hauls himself up and stumbles away. The _other's_ eyes are still open, gaping blindly. But there is no wheeze of breath from its ravaged throat. Lying down gingerly, the wolf rests his head on his paws and closes his eyes.

* * *

A thousand knives driven into his muscles. _Fire. _A thousand hammers shattering his bones. A thousand snakes shivering into their burrows. _Blood. _A sharp rough press against his face. _Ignore it._ His back is screaming. The transformation is complete, but his back is still screaming.

Remus opens his eyes. He blinks. Tangled, brown, soggy. He is lying on the ground. He is looking at the earth before him, a sodden mess of leaves, of trampled dirt. _And blood_.

It is before dawn; the jungle is grey, obscured by a cool damp mist. He tries to raise himself from the jungle floor and discovers that will alone is not enough. _Wait._ He tries again, locating his limbs, leveraging his weight firmly against untrustworthy arms and manages to half-sit. Sudden fire surges through his left arm and he notices the long, red gash on his forearm. He can practically hear the wounds tearing open across his back. He closes his eyes against the waves of pain, his arms shaking with the effort of supporting his body. Remus vomits onto the ground before him; the metallic taste of blood causes him to heave again, shuddering well after his stomach is empty.

_If you fall here, you're going to land in that._ He pushes himself fully upright and falls to the side almost immediately, the jungle spinning crazily around him. Squeezing his eyes shut again, Remus concentrates on breathing, focusing on each part of his body in turn, cataloguing his wounds and registering the fresh seep of blood through broken scabs and caked dirt. _Always thought that was unfair._ A warmth on his skin tells him the sun has risen and is slanting through a break in the trees. _Gaping wounds, bleeding gashes, broken bones. Awfully hard to kill a werewolf._ Gradually his limbs stop shaking, his stomach stops churning. _Rip and tear and cut and bite. No matter. We won't die. We'll just...bleed. _

He remembers. As the sun climbs in the sky, his mind clears and the post-transformation muddle of wolfish instinct is chased away by sensible, logical, never-without-a-bloody-reasonable-thought Remus. _Good morning, Remus. Rough night?_ He remembers sinking his teeth into the _kali vastu's_ neck, remembers the burn of its claws ripping across his back. _Going to have a fucking lovely scar there, mate._ He can still taste its blood.

_Merlin, I hope it's dead._

He awakes some time later, weak, feverish and shivering despite the oppressive jungle heat. Sitting up is still difficult but he manages without too much cursing. Looking around stupidly, Remus grimaces at the blood-soaked earth. Then his eyes fall on the shadow.

That's all it looks like. A shadow, a soft cloak draped across the jungle floor, as though a woman in mourning carelessly dropped her shawl walking away from the funeral. He crawls closer to it. At awkward angles, like some malevolent pixie graveyard, the razor-sharp claws are dug into the earth in two jagged clusters. The curving fangs, as long as Remus' hand, shine in the sun like discarded jewels. He reaches hesitantly toward the dark swath but stops just before touching it. He does not want to feel it; he does not want to know what it is. He does not want the shadow to shift and crumble and reveal two dull, dead, yellow eyes.

Instead, he picks the claws and teeth from the earth and climbs unsteadily to his feet. His right leg nearly gives way beneath him, but he manages to stay upright. Blinking in the sunlight, he is disoriented for a moment before he thinks to look up at the sun and aim himself south.

* * *

Remus keeps only one claw for himself. The rest he gives to the old man and his wife and to the families of the people who died. Though he heals the vicious cuts on his arm, leg and back quite well, he is still shaky and drained. Rakesh's mother insists that he spend a few days of convalescence in her home, playing host to a steady stream of visitors from Pakhari and nearby villages. People bring food in exchange for his story; he tells them he killed the _kali vastu_ with a machete but lost the blade in the jungle. They offer thanks, congratulations and invitations, and Remus is fairly certain that one man offers his shyly smiling daughter, but he faces every visitor with the same downcast eyes and forced smile.

He does not sleep. At night, when the village is quiet, Remus leaves the stifling house and limps along the road in the light of the waning moon. The night he spent in the heartwood was just that, a single night; no days were stolen, no hours lost. Remus considers a few explanations but soon gives up, unable to concentrate, and instead spends his night-time hours thinking as little as possible.

Chandrasekhar comes from Nainital. He says very little and does not ask Remus for any explanation. After a lavish meal attended by most of the village, the two wizards walk quietly away from village.

"It truly is an impressive map," Chandrasekhar says, after a long silence.

Remus looks at him, surprised. "It's rather rough."

"You will go home to England?"

Taking in a long breath, Remus rubs a hand over his face. _Home to England._ He thinks of familiar faces in England, of lives that have been quietly returning to normal for eight peaceful months. "Yes," he answers slowly. "I suppose."

Shrugging, the older man smiles but says nothing more. Later, Chandrasekhar pays Remus almost apologetically and says that he is leaving for Bangladesh in the morning on important business, but he will send Salil back to Pakhari to drive Remus to the train station in Kathgodam when he feels well enough to leave.

That night Remus returns to his bungalow, thankful for the solitude and for the sudden exhaustion that has overtaken him. Before extinguishing the light, however, he spends a few minutes examining the map, tracing the gently creeping borders of the heartwood with his fingers. His back still hurts, but the sharp pain he feels when he moves too suddenly is almost welcome compared to the low, dull ache of tension his head and neck. Rolling his shoulders and yawning, Remus notes that there is still only one gecko standing watch on the wall above his bed, but there are two beetles on the opposite wall, the size of his thumb and iridescent blue.

Remus starts to roll the map up, then pauses, his gaze falling on the crisp symbol for the mountainside spring. He frowns, imagining how the map would look if he had designated a primary location within the heartwood rather than outside its borders, then wonders why he didn't think of that before. But he pushes the thought aside and tucks the map into his case alongside Corbett and Fangworthy. A corner of tattered beige paper jammed beneath the books catches his eye.

Among the papers Undersecretary Singh forced into his hands at the Ministry offices in New Delhi is a pamphlet entitled "Leaving Procedure". He pulls it from his case and looks over the numbered regulations; there are seventy-two in all, suggesting that the Indian Ministry of Magic suffers from some bizarre bureaucratic form of separation anxiety. Remus dedicates a full thirty seconds to contemplating whether transforming into a ravenous werewolf and ripping the throat out of a amorphous man-eating predator constitutes "actions inappropriate and disrespectful to the Natural Environment of India", or perhaps "extended contact with Unhealthful Agricultural conditions in rural regions". Crumpling the paper and tossing it aside, he startles a cockroach that has been inching along the floor.

"I'm terribly sorry," Remus apologises, but the insect has vanished underneath the bed.

Closing his case and setting it on the floor, Remus says, "_Nox_," and lies back on the bed, shifting restlessly for a few minutes to find the position that least aggravates his healing back. Then he closes his eyes and exhaustion washes over him like a warm bath, weighing each limb down into the bed, slowing his breathing to a deep, steady rhythm until, finally, he falls asleep.

* * *

Saying goodbye to an entire Indian village is a lengthy task, so Remus begins early in the morning. Salil is waiting patiently in the car as Remus accepts endless well-wishes and makes vague promises to return someday. The old man and his wife, she barely strong enough to stand but smiling widely nonetheless, have come up the valley to bid him farewell. Rakesh's mother gives a silent, tearful smile and touches Remus' cheek gently. Rakesh shakes Remus' hand solemnly, and Remus bites back a dozen desperate questions--_What will you do now? Will you live in this village forever? Don't you have plans, dreams, ideas?_\--questions that he should have asked weeks ago but are hollow and meaningless now.

"Thank you," Remus says, sincerely.

Rakesh looks slightly amused. "You will have a safe journey," is all he replies.

The young boys of the village chase the car and shout as Remus and Salil drive away. Remus turns around and waves obligingly, then settles against the seat as the village is hidden behind a turn in the road.

Salil turns to him and grins. "Many people say goodbye to you."

"Yes." Remus pauses. "Yes, they do."

When they arrive in Kathgodam several hours later, Salil offers to wait with Remus until the train leaves for Delhi, but Remus thanks him and says it is not necessary. He shakes Salil's hand and says one more goodbye, then watches as the black car dodges into traffic. Remus steps into the dirty, crowded train station and notes that there is a train for New Delhi leaving at 20:15 and arriving early in the morning. He starts toward the ticket window then stops, shifting his case from one hand to the other and scanning the other destinations on the sign. It is difficult to read past the missing letters and messy corrections.

A man in a brown suit jostles him, but Remus doesn't move, staring at the sign until it fades from view and he sees only a pale white blur. Part of him wonders what he must look like, a scruffy white man standing dumbly in the middle of the train station, gaping at the sign as Indian businessmen and families scurry all around, clutching tattered cases and handbags, in their best suits and most colourful _saris_ because travel is still an occasion, an event worthy of careful planning and honest respect, a memory for the children to recall after many tired years, ticket stubs to keep and photographs to cherish, beginning with this hectic crush at the ticket window and the grim tiled room that smells like cigarettes and petrol and men gone too long without soap.

Remus imagines himself from overhead, a still silent figure, a rock in the stream as another train creaks noisily into the station and travellers surge forward like ants swarming a dead caterpillar on the jungle floor, and the tracks carry them away with excruciating slowness at first, but they accelerate and at some point, perhaps, fall into line beside a wide, shimmering river that carries silt and snowmelt and pale blue, spice-scented forgiveness from the mountains, losing its clarity with every muddy, crowded, worshipful mile, before finally tumbling into the ocean. But the river does not die in the sea. The water is always moving, always flowing, chasing along the coasts and tripping over islands, spreading through the oceans like a drop of red in a colourless potion, diluting and fading until it is no more than a pale pink mist that breaks against the grey rocks etched in Remus' memory, a jumble of sea-carved stones at his feet, draped in a fog so thick the island is invisible. But he when he squints he sees shapes and figures, half-formed faces and dancing hands reaching desperately across the water, and the muttering of the waves dragging against the stone becomes a voice, the voice becomes a plea, the plea becomes maniacal laughter. Remus closes his eyes and turns away from the shore. Britain at his feet is a flat, featureless, green map, borders and roads in crisp certain black, arrows denoting the movement of dead armies and artful scripts honouring towns and villages with names of men whose lives are long forgotten. The legend captures symbols in a neat rectangular box, explanations and complications, occasions for pity and engagements of doubt, familiar names and faces slightly obscured by the thick, scented smoke blowing in from the east.

Somebody bumps Remus and he starts.

He can feel it, in that second when odour, sound and colour crash around him once again, the power that floats on the air like incense, the chaos that burns in his scars and seizes every reason, apology or excuse and transforms it into something dark and changeable, flowing like the _kali vastu_ behind the shadows, rippling in the moonlight.

Then, all at once, the feeling fades. He shifts his case again to the other hand, wiping a sweaty palm on his trousers and joining the mob-like queue before the ticket window. Dark eyes watch him suspiciously. Rather than looking away he meets each gaze for the briefest moment, wondering at the thoughts behind the veiled expressions.

Behind the grimy window a scowling man barks, "Yes? Station?"

Remus buys a ticket to Haridwar.


End file.
